Hypothetical Biology

Humans are biologically stupid.

That’s right, we’re all anatomically retarded. We have two hands, two feet, two ears, two eyes and even two separate methods of expelling waste from our bodies and yet we have only one way to breathe. Think about that for a moment because a little while ago the full ramifications of having only one method of breathing became crystal clear to me. I wanted to breathe but I couldn’t and so I got to thinking about how stupid human anatomy was and how I’d give Darwin a piece of my mind if I met him in the afterlife.

I may have thought about kicking his ass, too.

Now, humans can live without sight or sound, without our hands and feet, but none of us can ever live without breathing, right? So doesn’t it make sense for us to have an alternate method of getting air into our lungs just in case something was to go wrong? I mean really, who does quality control for Mother Nature anyway? Arthur Anderson?

Wait, this story’s a little too embarrassing for me to tell so I’ll give you a hypothetical situation to ponder instead, ok?

Let’s say a man is sitting at home all alone doing nothing too important. Suddenly and without warning, his single air passage becomes blocked by, oh, I don’t know… a small piece of chocolate chip cookie dough from a late night bowl of ice cream. This frozen piece of dough wedges itself quite firmly in place and decides it rather likes its surroundings, would enjoy prolonging its stay in the esophagus and would someone be so kind as to call the cabana boy to rub some sunscreen on its back while it lounges by the pool?

It is at this point that a secondary breathing apparatus would have been much appreciated by the hypothetical man.

Now, some of you might be thinking to yourselves, “GeekMan, we already have a secondary breathing apparatus. It’s called a nose.” Untrue, I say. The nose is connected to the same pipe as your mouth and so, if the pipe becomes blocked then your nose becomes as useless as your mouth. This is why I feel the nose is only good for sensing where the Froot Loops are hidden and for producing copious amounts of mucus which will tend to drip out at the most inappropriate of times.

Onto your plate at dinner with the parents of your significant other, for example.

Now luckily, our hypothetical man with a breathing problem is sufficiently quick on his mental feet to figure out how to save himself and manages to forcibly dislodge the offensive piece of food from his throat before the grim reaper showed up. The removal of the dastardly dough involved many carefully thought out steps of meticulous and deliberate actions. One of these steps was frantically and forcibly striking himself in the stomach with his own fist, not unlike an angry and sexually frustrated chimpanzee in heat.

I didn’t say he was a smart hypothetical man.

When the Dough of Danger was finally removed, our hypothetical man might have been seen to slowly squish it between his thumb and index finger in an act of angry defiance. A hypothetical piece of Bread might have turned to a hypothetical Ex Boxx and say, “Damn. I guess I owe you five bucks, he’ll live after all.” If our hypothetical man had had two different methods of breathing he might have been able to breathe well enough to curse the hypothetical figments of his hypothetical imagination. Instead, he pondered the stupidity of having only one way to breathe while ignoring the snickering figments of his imagination and eating the rest of the pint of ice cream in righteous anger.

At the time, it was the only way he could think of to properly punish it.