evolutionary wise, very far into the future would we develop different mouths and very few teeth?
Pills as food wouldn’t ever catch on, people like too much about food to just settle on eating pills for the rest of their lives. Even though there is a niche who enjoy huel.
If we don’t chew, our jaws would not develop. The bone growth of our faces would change and our teeth would become incredibly crowded and crooked.
One of the current leading theories for why we now often need braces is called the Soft Foods Theory. The basic idea is that we eat much softer foods than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, so we aren’t stimulating as much bone growth in our jaws when we chew our food, which leaves our teeth with insufficient space to grow in straight.
If we didn’t chew at all and just took pills for food, we’d probably need to get all of our teeth removed as part of growing up, we’d have no chins and we’d all talk much differently than we do now.
I like the Fifth Element’s take on “pills for food.”
Put pill on plate, put in a microwave type thing for 2 seconds, pull out an entire roast chicken with fixings.
Mmm… Chikahn! 🤤
Well our mouths wouldn’t change just because they are no longer needed the way they were before.
It would only change if there was a negative effect of having a mouth and teeth like we have now.You could say if we don’t need our teeth anymore, they might disappear over time, but that would only occur if having teeth lead to higher death rates and fewer children being born. But we’ve generally come so far with our technology that we’re not really that much dependend on the “survival of the fittest” rule anymore.
If we didn’t need our teeth and let those people who have tooth decay die from infections instead of treating them with our modern technology, then very very slowly those who had a random mutation that leads to them not having teeth at all actually have a better survivability than those who have teeth. But as we treat them, they have the same chance of reproducing as everyone else.
You could also argue that it’s better for survivability to have as few body parts on you as possible that you need to provide energy for and those parts that you have being most energy efficient. So it could be that we at least develop smaller mouths when it’s no longer a benefit of having a bigger jaw etc. But this also wouldn’t happen because there is no reason why someone would die of having to spend too much energy on their body nowadays.
Are you aware of the changes in modern teeth due to dietary changes? Basically, we now need braces because we no longer chew such hard dense foods.
But it’s not like the teeth adjusted to our diet because they had to. It’s just that it’s no longer detrimental to survival to not have perfectly aligned teeth and so those who now have braces are perfectly fine and able to reproduce. Now the future ratio of people in need for braces is only a matter of how many people that needed braces and how many that didn’t need them get children and that isn’t dependent on their teeth anymore.
Semi related: I recently lost my taste for covid reasons and during that time I’d happily eat those pills if I had no taste.
Not pills, but nutritionally complete drinks exist and are fairly popular… there’s a section for them in the local supermarket that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.
Pills would have the same problem as anything else Economics means they’d charge the same or more (because they could) than making food anyway, making it unviable as a complete replacement for most. Or they’d make cheaper ones that were bad for you - like ready meals, you can buy quite healthy ones at a price or get total crap cheap, guess what most buy.
Since mankind mostly decoupled from natural evolution, we wouldn’t develop other mouths. But our look would still change because the jaw muscles wouldn’t be trained and maybe our facial expression could become very underdeveloped.
Humans have decoupled themselves from evolution in the typical sense.
Survival/gene-elimination cues don’t really apply anymore since we have hospitals and can take car of eachother.
I think the major remaining factor for our evolution now will either be self guided, or it will be who ever can have sex the most.
About 900 years ago in China humans developed overbites, previous skulls showed biting edges that aligned, more like apes. The same happened in Europe about 250 years ago. The change was too abrupt to be evolutionary, and the times lined up with the adoption of chopsticks (and the precutting of food to suit) in China and the adoption of knife and fork in Europe. The muscles in our jaws need exercise to develop, like any other muscle. Weakness in these muscles, (experiments support) lead to human development of overbites, which is the norm now. https://www.businessinsider.com/using-cutlery-has-changed-the-human-face-2015-3?r=US&IR=T That may mean if we raised our young on a tougher diet without cutlery or precutting most of that overtbite would not develop and our facial structure would look quite different. And an even less chewy diet would exaggerate the overbite further, over timescales much shorter than evolution takes effect, i,e. It would be a developmental structural change capable of being reversed, not a genetic hereditory change.
