The Evolutionary Origins of Hiccups and Hernias

[leo-rcc]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=this-old-body

My favorite passage:

While I was struggling to understand the body’s internal structures, I was given space in a 100-year-old building that needed to be renovated into a modern laboratory. When we opened the walls to look at the plumbing, wiring and other mechanicals, we saw a tangle that made no apparent sense; cables, wires and pipes took bizarre loops and turns throughout the building. Nobody in their right mind would have designed my building to conform to the snarled mess we saw when the wall was removed. Constructed in 1896, the utilities reflect an old design that has been jury-rigged for each renovation done over previous decades. If you want to understand the twisting pathways for a cable or a pipe, you have to understand their history and how they have been modified over the years. The same is true for structures in the human body.