fucking ow

[pauraque_bk]

Still working the toothache remedies, and also got the dentist to score me some vicodin. I wonder why tooth pain gets so blindingly intense... what's the evolutionary value there? In the absence of modern dentistry wouldn't it just be a source of disabling pain for tons of the population? All the time in egyptology you hear about mummies with severely decayed and abcessed teeth (partly because of the environment; sand would get in their food and cause dental wear and tear), which boggles my mind. I'd rather have them all pulled out than that, though the prospect of having damaged teeth extracted without anesthesia is a bit daunting.

Maybe proximity to the face/brain/"self" makes it seem worse than it is? I don't know. God fucking damn it though.

Comments

Aw man, LJ ate my original comment:

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I think your theory is good except for the connection between metabolism and teeth. Birds have a very high metabolism and they don't have teeth at all. You could say that 'well, birds fly', but it seems increasingly likely that they inherited the metabolism from dinosaurs, who had teeth that shed. (And of course, we would also be ignoring all the birds who went back to ground and kept their metabolism without their teeth.)

Re: Aw man, LJ ate my original comment:

[sedesdraconis.livejournal.com]

Aw man, LJ ate my original comment

:( I hate when that happens.

If birds evolved from dinosaurs that had high metabolisms and mammal-like complex teeth and then lost them and kept them lost even when they stopped flying (and we know birds have the ability to start growing teeth again, so it is actually significant that they didn't); then that would be, as you say, a significant problem with the theory that mammals' teeth are important to their metabolisms.

However, that is not the case. The dinosaurs birds evolved from, theropods, did not have complex, interlocking teeth, they had the standard rows of spikes common to vertebrates (as opposed to ornithopods, which had complex, differentiated teeth like mammals).

So the question is not, "how could birds have lost their teeth if teeth are crucial to a mammal's high metabolism". It is "how did theropods, avian and non, solve the problem of high metabolism that mammals require complex teeth to solve". This is a much less problematic question, since it suggests theropods evolved a different solution (there are always other solutions), rather than that birds had a good solution and lost it.

Re: Aw man, LJ ate my original comment:

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I still think there must be a much better reason for us to have non-replicable teeth than metabolism since there obviously IS a different solution. (Caveat: of course, evolution doesn't always pick the most efficient system - it works with what it's got.)

I tend to think that the reason we have non-replaceable teeth is because cutting-and-grinding action is just SO GOOD that evolution does not care about losing a certain percentage of gene carriers to tooth decay. It strikes me as inefficient, but what the hell. If evolution was a tech person, I think she'd try to feed me a line about it being feature not a bug.

I do want to correct the bit about the Ornithopods: they had complex, differentiated teeth that were also replaceable. The rate of replacement of each tooth in the tooth battery is used to estimate the population of all the hadrosaurs. Aaaand the reason that matters is because now it seems like they had feathers too (http://www.livescience.com/animals/090318-feathered-ornithischian.html). Which is pretty recent and also, mind-blowing.

Maybe you knew that and I'm just being an ass. My apologies if so.