Face
An immediately apparent indicator of human health that informs human sexual selection.
Despite how important these signals are in navigating the social world, the human face has become maimed over the last hundred years. No other animal in recorded history experiences malocclusions anywhere near the scale of homo sapiens.
The misunderstanding of this phenomenon has caused doctors to believe that malocclusions requiring braces and oral surgery are in some way related to genetics. They are not. Additionally, this disruption to facial symmetry and proportionality makes us less attractive, which is denounced by self-esteem advocates as vain and regressive. It is not. Fitness for sexual selection is largely influenced by observations of symmetry and proportionality, which are reliable indicators of overall health, and good health is interpreted as attractive. The more attractive we are, the better we are treated by anyone and everyone.
Relatively speaking, the more attractive you are, the nicer people are to you. You are more employable, people are willing to cooperate with you more, and you are likely to receive more gifts. These are obvious, but the benefits can be far less intuitive as well. An example of this is that the more attractive you are, the more likely you are to receive a lenient sentence if convicted of a crime. The perks expand from there and virtually every aspect of human life is easier if you are more attractive than you could have been otherwise.
Attractiveness is not the only concern when it comes to a properly developed jaw and face. A malformed jaw can contribute to the development of sleep apnea and other sleep disruptions. Difficulties with sleep contribute to a host of other health problems that can have a dramatic effect on our quality of life and longevity. Even a cursory examination of the detriments of poor-quality sleep should be enough to consider a change of habit, but other health problems are implicated as well, such as allergies and cognitive disorders. The application of braces and surgery to remove wisdom teeth can help alleviate these problems, but it is the underlying cause of these potentially unnecessary treatments that needs to be studied.
What exactly is causing this unprecedented facial deformation? Such a dramatic shift in the prevalence of malocclusions cannot be genetic. Despite humourous conjecture about the utility of wisdom teeth, evolution does not arbitrate changes in jaw size and shape while keeping ill-fitting teeth that become impacted so frequently. This would be putting the jaw cart before the tooth horse. A mutation does not seem to have occurred either. Even if it had, mutations do not present congruently across distinct populations. If a mutation did occur, an insufficient amount of time has elapsed to permit malocclusions to have spread in the epidemic manner that they have. Only a pathogen could have spread this quickly, but no evidence exists for a pathogenic explanation.
Due to a process of elimination, there is only one type of explanation remaining for this novel phenomenon: environmental. Human eating habits have changed significantly in the last hundred years, and prior to this shift in diet and the widespread introduction of utensils, malocclusions and facial deformities were extremely rare. Such improvements to the quality, availability, and convenience of consuming food have been extremely valuable, but an unexpected side-effect in the reduction in biting, tearing and chewing of tougher products was the creation of a novel problem.
We are members of an ancient evolutionary lineage that was built to consume food a particular way, with purpose-built teeth and a jaw that requires consistent tempering throughout our lives. As such, healthy human facial and jaw development is inextricably determined by the continuance of such practices, regardless of how backwards they may seem.
The solution is not to dispense with modern food or even utensils, rather it is to complement our diet with practices that seek to replicate the outcomes associated with ancient consumption behaviours that our development was predicated upon. This is not being done due to a failure of the medical community to think about the problem through an evolutionary lens, unless your name is Mike Mew. This is concerning given the fact that they are doctors.
Unfortunately, this conclusion threatens the billion-dollar orthodontics industry, which is projected to triple their revenue in the next few years due to the increasing demand for braces.
There is no money in preventing facial maiming in humans.
Revised: 13 Feb 2023
