Jonathan Reisman: The Human Body - From Sex & Sperm to Hands & Heart | Lex Fridman Podcast #297

We have two tubes that are right next to each other in the throat. One is for food, drink, saliva, mucus, snot, whatever you're gonna swallow. All of that stuff must go down the esophagus, the food tube, and end up in the stomach. And right next to the esophagus, millimeters away, is the windpipe or the trachea, which goes down to the lungs.

Throat, heart, feces, genitals.

Every organ, from moment to moment, keeps us alive and ensures our survival. The genitals are s- in a way, the opposite.

How would you improve the penis and the vagina? The following is a conversation with Jonathan Reisman, a physician and writer of The Unseen Body: A Doctor's Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy. He has practiced medicine in some of the world's most remote places, including the Alaskan and Russian Arctic, Antarctica, and the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Jonathan Reisman. You wrote a book called Unseen Body, all about the human body, the messy, the weird, the beautiful, and the fascinating details. So, from an evolutionary perspective, are most parts of the human body a feature or a bug? Is it, like, the optimal solution or just a duct tape solution?

Great question. I think that most of the time, the way the body works is the best solution. Uh, I haven't seen many alternatives, so it's hard to compare. (laughs) But, um, I think, you know, there are some parts of the body that make more sense than others. You know, the way our hands work, for instance. Um, you know, the muscles are up in the forearm and then the tendons kind of come down like, uh, strings on a puppet. And just the dexterity it gives our hands is just really, uh, amazing, and it's hard to imagine a better- a better tool than the human hand to do everything from, you know, hold things, to, um, play piano, and do a million other daily activities that we do. Um, one thing I talk about in the book, there's some other body parts that seem to be lacking that kind of brilliant, um, design, such as the throat. You know, where the, uh, food, drink are swallowed and air is inhaled, and they kind of... those two paths come within millimeters of each other. And you slip up once, you laugh while eating, or you speak while trying to swallow, and you die from choking. So, it seems less than optimal. Though I'm not sure it could be better from th- the way we're kind of formed in the womb, as a... beginning as this tiny little tube. I don't think it could've been done any better or there's any other way to do it, but it is an unfortunate thing that, you know, does lead to some problems.