"Why do we have earlobes? They make no evolutionary sense." Topic

"Every time you nod along to your favorite tune or chit chat with a friend, an intricate system is at work making it possible. Your ears are biological marvels. There's a lot going on in there. "It's a very complex structure," Anne Le Maître, an evolutionary biologist, biological anthropologist, and post-doctoral researcher at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Austria, tells Popular Science.

That complexity is the result of intense selection pressure to hear better over millions of years. Except, possibly, for one part of them: the lobes. Amid all the finely tuned parts, there's these bits that don't quite add up. Here's how scientists make sense of our sensory organs…"

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Armand

Why do they have to make sense?

As long as they are not pierced they are lovely.

Handles?

It seems to me that they are begging the question that evolution has to "make sense".
Why don't humans have body hair, while apes do? That's genetic. Along the same line, explain inherited male pattern baldness?
Evolution doesn't "fine tune" the body. It's merely the result of those who got to breed. There is no plan. No blueprint. There is no guarantee that in 10,000 "we" will be closer to perfection.
The presence of earlobes is on a par with retaining the appendix. It makes no sense? So what?

(smile)

Armand

What continues is what doesn't kill us, or make us less fertile, or less attractive during our fertile period. It can also be what makes us more attractive during our fertile period.

Of course, apparently the most attractive quality to fertile women isn't biological at all: Wealth.

(Granted, the ability to acquire wealth is certainly a function of a man's brain and his ability to access risks versus reward correctly, and acting accordingly. Do that, and you get the girls!)

Napoleon needed something on the Old Guard to pinch affectionately! The alternatives were… unmentionable.