Humans are optimized in some very specific ways, but at the expense of some serious downsides.
As a related aside, I think its this misunderstanding that confuses people into preferring creationism. If one holds the anthropocentric view that humans are the peak of biological evolution (itself a meaningless concept... Evolution is about fitness, it's not directional), believing in creationism is a lot more understandable.
> One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.
I can. Reliably. I concentrate in the general direction of my diaphragm, and often times I can stop the third hiccup before it happens. I have to wait until the second hiccup before I know I'll have to use the technique. The only time I can't do it is when I've been drinking, which is, coincidentally, when I get them the most. I can't concentrate the way I need to, it's like that part of my brain is shut off.
When I'm drunk enough to not be able to stop my hiccups, they usually go away naturally without me even noticing them as I sober up. I eventually give up trying to control it after I notice it's futile, and the awareness that I'm even having them goes away. The hiccups themselves barely register and are quickly forgotten.
A couple of times I've gotten home realization dawns that I'm still hiccuping. Two, three hiccups later, they're gone. There's something about being alone in my room that makes me more capable of doing the technique than when I'm at the bar.
>It's an amazing epitome of evolutionary success...
And so is every other species. We've all been evolving together on this planet for the same amount of time.
This is why driving species to extinction is so spectacularly stupid — it squanders our collective legacy of genetic information, hard-won over billions of years of struggle. How many discoveries like this will never be made because we destroyed the species? Worse, how many useful functional species are we depriving ourselves of (including functions we don't even know we need yet)?
