Evolutionary Conundrum

originally posted by: yorkshirelad
...If you go back 150 years (I was reading about Brunels railways - a genius) ...

You were reading, 150 years ago?
I'm impressed.

...we did not have trains nor road vehicles nor even horse drawn vehicles capable of inducing that disconnect between the eye and the ear...

What about kayaks and waterfalls, and boating in a storm...or just...boating...?
Para-sailing, Hot-Air Balloon rides around the world...?
Snow-skiing...?
I don't know... Just questioning.

So how did this come about ? How did the biology of the brain evolve in such a way as to cause this problem when no human being ever experienced the problem until the 20th century! ...

You may be right -- but, we could also apply a similar scheme to "Why had no-one prior to the 20th Century experienced the velvety-smooth softness of Charmin tissues...?"
According to Science (as I was told) - it was physically impossible for a man to run "the mile" in under 4.00 minutes...
...The Heart Would Explode.
I understood this to be scientific fact...but...not only did a man beat that record...but they have been beating it regularly, since.

Maybe the mechanism was already in place...but, like any muscle -- needed resuscitation.

Good OP!

a reply to: yorkshirelad

sea sickness has been felt for a long time. it is motion sickness, just like the tilting train.

ETA: Evolution doesn't work like that. It isn't engineering purposefully.

Its more like this: we feel motion sickness because that is the way the myriad interactions yield out in the end, and since it didn't have an evolutionary disadvantage natural selection didn't really have any effect on it.

Now, if motion sickness caused you to drop over and die instantly, natural selection would wean out susceptible people within any population where motion sickness happened. So seafaring peoples would not have the genetic coding that creates the chain of events that leads to the physical sensation of motion sickness. But people far inland likely would have that genetic coding. So you would end up with one population resistent to instant death caused by motion sickness, and another that wasn't resistant. Kind of like sickle cell and malaria. Sickle cell is very rare in northern climes because it is a genetic disadvantage, not an advantage. So instead of providing you with increased longevity by making you immune to malaria, it decreases your longevity.

a reply to: yorkshirelad

Bumping this because it's an interesting OP concept (as well as a tiny push to ask you to do more threads, you are good at it. Pretty please with a speed-of-light cherry on top).