What can we learn from poop?

A gentleman named David Waltner-Toewes has written a new book called The Origin of Species: What Excrement Teaches Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society. (This is a funny title; check Charles Darwin to get the joke.)

National Geographic interviewed David about his book. Here's a selection:

Question: Explain what you mean by “Unless we change how we think about [poop], we are doomed to forever live in it.”

Until very recently, people thought of poop like just a big pile of manure [that needs to be disposed of]. So it ends up in waterways, creating pollution that leads to people getting sick. We need to think about ways to use the energy in that poop in various ways. For example, people are using poop to produce electricity and heat with biodigesters. Countries like Rwanda have mandated that public institutions have to take waste and put it through biodigesters—this creates methane that in turn produces heat or electricity. So it’s not just waste. 

Q. Can you describe some more unsung benefits of poop? 

The thing about excrement in general is that it’s part of life. Part of the argument I make in the book is that as soon as you have life, you have essentially poop. As life developed, the waste for one animal became food for another animal. We depend on a web of recycling of nutrients, and poop is an important part of that. People get sqeaumish but they shouldn’t be. If you don’t think of it as poop, but instead think of it as recycling nutrients, this is a really interesting and sustainable way to produce food.

Evolution Made Your Guts into Noodles!

Team Traveller!

Species change over time. And these changes are called evolution. Evolution explains lots of fun things…like why our earwiggling muscles don’t work that well anymore. But we don’t NEED to turn our ears in different directions to hear saber-toothed hamsters sneaking up on us! So the muscles are almost kaput.

By Kevin Dooley

Anyway, Rob Dunn over at Scientific American came up with the Top 10 Consequences of Having Evolved. My favorite was #4: “Unsupported intestines”!

See, our ancestors walked on four legs, like most mammals. (Animals like this are called quadrupeds.) So the guts of our ancestors were stretched out evenly along our body…like a dachsund’s!

"Mmm...apple."

But as humans evolved and stood up, our intestines hung down. In fact, our guts are all stacked on top of each other! What stinks about that is that this puts a lot of pressure on your guts. And your intestines will try to find a way out of this mess!

That’s what a hernia is: A loop of intestines sneaking out the holes above a man’s, er, scrotum. (Look it up!) As Rob Dunn says, our intestines do this “in the way that noodles sneak out of a sieve.”

Thanks, Rob. (Read his article!)