semyaza

Apologies if this has been posted before (couldn't find it in the search)...

It seems that the human female reproductive system is rather strangely designed. The average human female is born with 1 to 2 million eggs. However, the vast majority of these eggs can never be fertilized.

The average female will release one egg per cycle, about thirteen a year. Assuming that her fertile period lasts fifty years, this makes for a total of 650 eggs over a lifetime. Let's be generous and round that up to a thousand. That's still about 0.1% of the total number of eggs that she is born with.

When humans design systems for tough terrains (such as interplanetary travel) it is not uncommon to use redundant backups. However, no engineer would ever design a system with a thousand backup units. That would be both pointless and wasteful.

Why, then, did the Creator design such a strange system? The vast majority of a woman's eggs will not, indeed cannot, be fertilized. In fact, the majority of these eggs will die before she even reaches puberty.

Millions of female eggs makes no sense in mammals. However, amongst fish it does make sense. Since a female fish has a limited ability to defend her young, it makes more sense for her to lay thousands of eggs, thus increasing the chances that some will survive to adulthood.

Is it possible that the human female's millions of eggs is a relic of the very distant past, and has nothing at all to do with design, intelligent or otherwise?

MrDarwin

Hey, you want unintelligent design, look at the reproductive system of female hyenas. Either that, or the creator had a pretty twisted sense of humor...

RufusAtticus

Make that spotted hyenas.

Herman Hedning

Hmm, that's a weird system. But it is not unintelligently designed by G*d, it is instead cleverly designed by evolution to preserve only the offspring of the most dominant females. See here for some details.

Dr Rick

Only an idiot or a sadist would deliberately put the vagina, the urethra, and the anus in such close proximity to eachother.

Rick

pz

Wasn't it Garrison Keillor who complained about the stupidity of putting the sewage treatment plant right in the middle of the amusement park?

Viti

You can say that a million times. UTI's anyone??

lpetrich

And even worse is giving birth through the pelvic girdle. That's a very tight squeeze, and some babies don't make it. It would be more convenient to give birth in the forward direction, in C-section fashion.

However, it's an OK route for laying lots of small eggs.

Also, among most mammals, the testicles hang outside of the main body cavity, something which cools them a bit -- something which seems to be necessary for sperm cells to develop properly. This could be some relic of a temperature-dependent sex-determination system, which is common among reptiles. Interestingly, birds have internal testicles, though they also are warm-blooded and they also have a chromosome-mismatch sex-determination system (unlike the mammalian case, it's female birds that have some mismatched chromosomes).

Embryonic development has some absolutely weird freakouts. Vertebrate circulation starts out in a fishlike configuration, with blood taking the path

two-chambered heart -> ventral aortas -> aortic arches at the gills -> dorsal aortas -> body

The dorsal aortas meet rearward, forming a single aorta toward the rear of the body. Toward the front, both dorsal and ventral aortas extend into the head.

Fish, of course, keep much of that configuration; by contrast, land vertebrates remove several of the aortic arches as they grow. Also, the heart gets at least partially split in two, becoming three-chambered or four-chambered

Among birds and mammals, one of the lastmost "systemic arches" gets removed -- the right one in mammals, the left one in birds.

Isn't comparative anatomy fun?

Osiris

Even though this link doesn't address the specific problem posed...

http://www.umkc.edu/sites/hsw/other/evolution.html

It does show how evolution caused many of the other more esoteric parts of the human reproduction process. It might give you a starting place to answer this question. If not, the whole paper is sure to provoke hours of discussion amoung the sexes.

MrDarwin

Just goes to show what we already knew, God likes boys better than girls