evolutionary wise, very far into the future would we develop different mouths and very few teeth?
Pills as food wouldn’t ever catch on, people like too much about food to just settle on eating pills for the rest of their lives. Even though there is a niche who enjoy huel.
If we don’t chew, our jaws would not develop. The bone growth of our faces would change and our teeth would become incredibly crowded and crooked.
One of the current leading theories for why we now often need braces is called the Soft Foods Theory. The basic idea is that we eat much softer foods than our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, so we aren’t stimulating as much bone growth in our jaws when we chew our food, which leaves our teeth with insufficient space to grow in straight.
If we didn’t chew at all and just took pills for food, we’d probably need to get all of our teeth removed as part of growing up, we’d have no chins and we’d all talk much differently than we do now.
I like the Fifth Element’s take on “pills for food.”
Put pill on plate, put in a microwave type thing for 2 seconds, pull out an entire roast chicken with fixings.
Mmm… Chikahn! 🤤
It could be a possibility.
That might also mean that companies could look to create things that worked out our teeth and jaws to prevent that from happening (or maybe slow it down).
I like to think that it would be something similar to wonderbread - where once we removed all the nutrients from the white bread, we added in vitamins, except instead it would be large chewy pills.
I don’t need gummy gruel.
Well our mouths wouldn’t change just because they are no longer needed the way they were before.
It would only change if there was a negative effect of having a mouth and teeth like we have now.You could say if we don’t need our teeth anymore, they might disappear over time, but that would only occur if having teeth lead to higher death rates and fewer children being born. But we’ve generally come so far with our technology that we’re not really that much dependend on the “survival of the fittest” rule anymore.
If we didn’t need our teeth and let those people who have tooth decay die from infections instead of treating them with our modern technology, then very very slowly those who had a random mutation that leads to them not having teeth at all actually have a better survivability than those who have teeth. But as we treat them, they have the same chance of reproducing as everyone else.
You could also argue that it’s better for survivability to have as few body parts on you as possible that you need to provide energy for and those parts that you have being most energy efficient. So it could be that we at least develop smaller mouths when it’s no longer a benefit of having a bigger jaw etc. But this also wouldn’t happen because there is no reason why someone would die of having to spend too much energy on their body nowadays.
Are you aware of the changes in modern teeth due to dietary changes? Basically, we now need braces because we no longer chew such hard dense foods.
But it’s not like the teeth adjusted to our diet because they had to. It’s just that it’s no longer detrimental to survival to not have perfectly aligned teeth and so those who now have braces are perfectly fine and able to reproduce. Now the future ratio of people in need for braces is only a matter of how many people that needed braces and how many that didn’t need them get children and that isn’t dependent on their teeth anymore.
Since mankind mostly decoupled from natural evolution, we wouldn’t develop other mouths. But our look would still change because the jaw muscles wouldn’t be trained and maybe our facial expression could become very underdeveloped.
Not pills, but nutritionally complete drinks exist and are fairly popular… there’s a section for them in the local supermarket that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.
Pills would have the same problem as anything else Economics means they’d charge the same or more (because they could) than making food anyway, making it unviable as a complete replacement for most. Or they’d make cheaper ones that were bad for you - like ready meals, you can buy quite healthy ones at a price or get total crap cheap, guess what most buy.
It would take a very long time, but eventually teeth would go the way of our tails… that is if we let them.
Teeth could stick around for any number of reasons like pronunciation in language, or even sexual preference like a decoration. Further, as genetic research and engineering develops with tools like CRISPR CAS-9 proteins the human race will eventually be taking conscious control of our own evolution. Whether we would choose to keep our teeth with a diet of pills is a matter of speculation. I would, but who knows.
