Human Design Flaws?
I have been receiving a lot of great questions recently. This one came from one of my local class members:
“.. if you're looking for video topics, I’d love one on what I call the human design flaw spots. Humans are so reliant on these incredibly fragile spots - neck, wrists, ankles. Is there a daily movement exercise to keep these mobile and strong?”
Well I do have some exercises for those parts, but before I get to those I wanted to speak about some of the wider context around this question: do we have poorly engineered parts? Are they liabilities? And what can we do to support them in our daily lives?
Design Flaws?
First things first, and at the risk of being pedantic, humans do not have design flaws as humans are not a product of design. Instead, like all organisms, humans are the product of aeons of evolution. Evolution is not progressive and has no goals, it simply acts on genes, traits and pre-existing body plans to create anatomies that promote survival and reproduction.
Thus, humans have anatomies which are not necessarily perfect examples of engineering, but are the best (or at least good enough) result of what was possible for evolution to shape from the structures of our primate ancestors.
Do we have poorly engineered parts?
So have the quirks of evolution left us with certain flaws or ‘fragile spots” in our structure? It turns out the foot/ankle and hand/wrist come under particular criticism by both anthropologists and biologists as being ‘glitchy’. It does seem that these areas are particularly vulnerable: ankle and wrists are in the top three sites for both fracture and sprain injuries. Podiatry alone is a $6.6 billion industry in the US.
So, what is it that is so flawed about our ankles and wrists? Biologist 1 Nathan Lents, who has written a whole book on “human errors” writes “Why are there seven bones in our ankle and eight in our wrist, like a useless pile of rocks, good for nothing but sprains and strains?” And anthropologist 2,3 Jeremy DeSilva, being I am sure somewhat hyperbolic, suggests he would rather have an ostrich foot and ankle as it is much more efficient for bipedal (two legged) walking & running and much more stable than our sprain and fracture-prone arrangement.
Well sure, an ostrich foot-ankle arrangement is more efficient for bipedal running and walking on the savannah but that is not only what humans evolved doing. An ostrich foot would be totally useless to a human hunter-gatherer wanting to climb a tree for some honey or clamber over complex terrain to find berries. Our feet with 26 bones and 33 joints are capable of a mind-bogglingly greater number of unique shapes than an ostrich foot with only 8 bones. This means we are potentially able to negotiate trees, hills, cliffs, and forest floors with ease. Useless pile of bones they are not.
Rather than evolutionary glitches our human ‘fragile spots’ are instead trade-offs. We have ankles & feet that are good enough for bipedal walking and running while still also being good enough for clambering and scaling trees, rocks, cliffs etc.
Are these evolutionary trade-offs always liabilities?
The final question is do these trade-offs lead to liability (and the $6.6 billion foot bill?) and this brings me to my final point which is context or environment.
To illustrate this one most clearly, I am moving to another commonly cited evolutionary ‘error’. Humans along with other primates and guinea pigs are the only mammals known to be unable to make vitamin C and therefore we have to get this nutrient in our diet or we will die of scurvy.
This does indeed look much more like a true glitch than a trade-off: however this glitch was not a liability in the context of a natural human, primate or guinea pig diet with plenty of fresh vegetables and fruit. In fact in these environments it would not have mattered at all - which is presumably the reason it was allowed to go unchecked during evolution. The inability to make vitamin C is only a problem in a certain context: like the environment of a 17th century ship with only salted meat and dry crackers.
My guess is that our mobile ankles, wrists and necks would not have been such a liability in our past as they appear to be now. For most of our evolutionary history humans have been hunter-gatherers and our ankles, wrists and necks would have been strengthened and trained by copious amounts of movement essential to life.
We would have had more strength and mass in the muscles and tendons and bones that make up and support these apparently fragile areas of the body. This is supported by 4 anthropological data showing that bone strength and density measures have declined significantly as humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to farming and then industrial lifestyles.
If we look at the modern habitat of our wrists (typing and texting), ankles (walking on unvarying pavement in shoes) and necks (see wrist) we can see that any inherent weaknesses in structure might show up either over time or as a sudden injury.
So what can we do to keep our more mobile parts strong?
In addition to some specific exercises (coming next time and on social media!). My advice is to look at the current movement context of your wrists, ankles and necks and see how you could make some small and gradual changes to their environment. Places to look would be:
Footwear - barefoot shoes allow all of your foot to participate in walking and not just the ankle. But transition to minimal shoes slowly and gradually as your feet might not be used to working very much!
Paths you take - always take the one less travelled by: introduce hills and rough paths to challenge your ankle and feet in all directions.
How do you carry items - on your back, in a trolley or cart? Try your hands
Chores - Are there jobs you outsource to electronic tools that you could do with your hand & wrist- making bread, grinding coffee?
Computer time - remind yourself at regular times to give your neck some movement and look around your room or out the window.
References
https://rusoffagency.com/book-info/wsj-essay/
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-evolution-gain-came-pain
https://leakeyfoundation.org/2015why-walk-on-two-legs/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1418646112