Today at dinner I was talking with my grandparents and we got to wondering about how eating and breathing in people shares the same passage, at least for a while. In something like fish, though none of us know anything of fish anatomy, we speculate that presumably the gills and thus the respiratory system and the digestive system, that is, mouth, are totally seperate. What advantage does having them occupy the same space grant? We couldn’t think of any explanation. Is there one? Presumably, a fish can not choke, while a person can? If a fish can in fact choke in some sense, is there any animal that can not?
breathe where you eat
October 14th, 2006 · 2 Comments
Tags: personal crap
2 responses so far ↓
1 cassiph // Oct 14, 2006 at 10:07 pm
We actually talked about this in my evolutionary biology class. Mainly the answer – as best I recall it, which is weak – was that there isnt much that is advantageous about it, but that it probably began as a mutation and didn’t cause any problems and so just stuck. There was no variation to it that allowed a different option to arise.
But I may go back on my word later, when Project Runway isnt distracting me.
2 cassiph // Oct 19, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Alright, so I was reminded of this and looked a bit. It seems that infants can swallow and breathe at the same time for about the first year of their life – until their larynx (I think, the area that contains your capacity for speech) moves downward ever so slightly, allowing the infant to create a larger variety of sounds, but also elliminating this ability to swallow and breathe simultaneously. From that info, I would guess that we lost this ability as we increased our vocal abilities, and the quickest way for speech to evolve was to slide that little box down, rather than create a whole new set of tubes – which we had already lost once through evolution when we went from gill to mouth breathing. But that much is just guess.
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