... I get them sometimes.
This one came to me driving to my mother's funeral. I was thinking about how amazing it is that children grow new teeth. I have a cracked tooth right now, and loose tooth is a sensation I have not felt since I was a child. And then the idea came to me:
Q. What if there are developmental stages in humans that have never appeared because we just haven't lived long enough for them to happen?
Think about it for a second. If our genetic code has some provision to grow new lungs or a third set of teeth at age 125 or something, we wouldn't know about it yet. But we might as medical science prolongs our lives. Something about the design (intelligent or random, it matters not) of humans allows for a second set of teeth. I wonder if any animals grow new organs in old age. Certainly some grow new organs during life (salamanders, etc.). Ah, the stuff I think about.
This is stupid and implausible. But interesting. The small child in me disparately wishes my mother could have grown a new pair of lungs. Maybe that's on the horizon.
A sub-set of this odd thought is meditation on redundant pairs of organs in our body. Redundant might not be the right word: eyes, ears, lungs, kidneys... all these things come in pairs and you can live with only one. I think your life is significantly diminished without a working pair, but loss of one is certainly survivable.
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