• Coldus12@reddthat.com
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    6 months ago

    I dont think body odor ever played an evolutionary role. As far as I know body odor is caused by bacterias eating and multiplying whenever we sweat. If this is the case body odor is here because we sweat which isnt that common within the animal kingdom.

    (Although dont quote me on any of this, this is just what I seem to remember and Im lazy to look it up - tldr i might be lying)

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      That doesn’t exclude it having a purpose. A lot of our existence we owe to bacteria inhabiting our body

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Not everything is an evolved functional trait, like the first poster was saying.
        Loosing our hair and getting greasy was a functional adaptation. That grease getting stinky is just a byproduct that didn’t introduce a negative selection pressure.

        Evolution doesn’t have a plan, it just takes the shortest path towards better that doesn’t make things worse.
        Giraffes have a nerve that runs from their brain, down to their torso, then back up to the top of their neck. There’s no reason or benefit to this, it’s purely because when what the nerve runs to evolved in reptiles, it was at the top of the torso. Neck gets longer, nerve follows since there’s no pressure to select against stupid nerve layout. There’s a species of toad that evolved to become so small that their ear bones can’t actually pick up the sound of their species mating chirp. They still chirp, but none of them can hear it, and instead they signal based on seeing the motion of chirping.

      • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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        6 months ago

        Nope, evolution is chaos. The current planet is the output of a chaotic system. You seriously think koalas play an evolutionary role? Platypus? Hell even humans have about 20 design flaws. Sometimes nature just threw shit at a wall and called it “good enough.”