What would you improve?
Mark Hoofnagle at Denialism has a neat article on what would you improve if you could redesign the human body. I''m fine with an appendix, I''m not female so I don''t really care about childbirth, and I''m still fairly young so I am not really concerned with my prostate. However, I would like to upgrade my senses. I''d like eyes like a hawk, ears like an owl, touch like a star-nosed mole, and a nose like bloodhound.
Birds have acute vision, but also can see ultraviolet light. Their world must be particularly colorful. How cool is that?
Besides having rather keen hearing, Owls have asymmetrical ear openings permitting it to precisely locate things even in the absence of visual cues. My hearing isn''t so great so this would be nice for me.
Star-nosed moles have rather exquisite senses of touch since they are functionally blind.
Bloodhounds have exceptionally sensitive noses. Imagine being able to figure out where your partner is in the grocery store by following their scent? I guess the drawback is that garbage will smell pretty bad.
Presumably it is possible for humans to evolve all these traits given enough time and the proper selective forces. In fact, it is likely that a number of of our senses have degenerated via relaxed selection over the millennia.
I''d also like to be able to jump higher than four inches, but let''s leave that for another time.
Drawing from WikiCommons.