Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 16, 1995 TAG: 9502170001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: Who designed this mess? Is it just a terrible mistake or some kind of cruel joke? Every time you swallow something you know you have to get that piece of food safely past the opening to your windpipe. Feeding children is a white-knuckle affair.
There's a great new book that explains our stupidly constructed eating and breathing apparatuses: ``Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine'' by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams. They say the problem is an ``evolutionary legacy'' that had its origins in a worm.
The worm, Nesse says, was a type of ``larval tunicate'' (as was what we had for dinner last night in the Why bunker). The worm lived eons ago. It was the original mouth-breather, you might say. It fed on microorganisms strained from water. It didn't need a respiratory system because it was so small. Dissolved gases just diffused into its tissues.
As the creature evolved and grew larger, a very primitive gill-like respiratory system developed in the forward end of the digestive system. This structure was no problem for a small creature. It only grew problematic for later vertebrates - but by then it was too late to go back and start over with separate pipes. Fish, dogs, people: We all have the same problem.
Nesse told us, ``It's really a maldesign. There's no reason it has to be this way. The only reason it's that way is that evolution cannot do fresh starts.''
The problem would have been solved if our ancestors had developed nostrils below the mouth, on the neck. But they needed their nostrils up high, to stick out of the water while most of the body was submerged. At the same time the windpipe developed forward of the esophagus. So the two breathing and eating systems have no choice but to collide.
When you breathe, air comes down the nasopharynx into the throat and has to skip across to the windpipe (trachea). The opening to the windpipe is called the glottis. When you swallow, a little flap of skin, called the epiglottis, automatically covers the glottis; it's a reflex. As a backup you have a choking reflex which expels anything that goes down the wrong pipe.
So it's not like we're completely without intelligently designed anatomical features. The body has a good attitude: It does the best it can with what it's got.
Q: Why was Freud so enamored of his cigar?
A: Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day, from when he awoke at 7 a.m. to when he went to bed after midnight. We can almost smell him from here.
Freud declined to assign any symbolic significance to his cigar. He's purported to have said, ``Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'' (though the American Psychiatric Association says the quote is apocryphal, or at least without any known citation). But Freud may have been guilty of repressing the symbolic significance of the cigar. It was his security blanket.
Evan J. Elkin, a New York psychiatrist, told us that a Freudian analysis of Freud's cigar smoking might probe whether the cigars revealed a oral dependency. ``We know that he was extremely attached to his mother. So is this someone who is orally dependent, orally motivated? Probably yes,'' Elkin said. But he said that's just one part of the picture.
Elkin recently wrote of Freud's cigar habit in the magazine Cigar Aficionado (hey, why isn't there a magazine called Dorito Aficionado?), saying Freud grew up watching his industrious father smoking cigars in his long hours at the fabric factory in Vienna. ``From early on, young Sigmund associated his father's smoking with his great capacity for hard work and self-control,'' writes Elkin.
Freud himself said the malodorous cancertube ``served me for precisely 50 years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life. ... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.''
The cigar was also a guy thing. Guys stood around smoking cigars, bonding, discussing psychoanalysis, trying to come up with demeaning theories about why women are so weird.
Eventually the cigars imperiled Freud's health. He developed cancer of the soft palate and the jaw. His doctors told him to stop smoking. He refused. When he did go cold turkey he became depressed. So he smoked almost until he died at 83 of cancer.
``His very own inability to modify his smoking habit illustrates a basic mechanism in human psychology that Freud termed `knowing and not knowing,' where an individual, faced with rational understanding, may still be unable to act appropriately,'' writes Elkin.
Also there's the little matter of addiction. Freud was a heavy user of not just nicotine but also cocaine. Freud toyed with his own addiction theory, something about finding a replacement for compulsive masturbation as a child. (Can we say that word? ``Compulsive''?)
A cigar is now a quaint old thing, suggesting a bygone world where men in top hats drank port after dinner and proudly patted their body blubber. And believed in Freud.
The Mailbag:
Noel A., of Cape Coral, Fla., asks, ``If you were to present me with one pound of plutonium, in what form would it be? How would it be contained? Feel to touch? Smell? Color?''
Dear Noel: Excellent idea for first prize in our next reader participation contest!
We turned to the U.S. Department of Energy, which makes nuclear weapons for the Pentagon. Spokesman Sam Grizzle says he's seen a ball of plutonium, and that it was silver and shiny. Plutonium would probably be warm to the touch.
``When it's fitted into a weapon it's in the form of something called a pit, and I can't get into the exact size and shape of it, but we use something like a bowling ball to describe it to somebody,'' says Grizzle.
Plutonium can also exist in powder form, but you don't want to get near that stuff, because you might inhale some, which would be deleterious to your health (we are guessing you would develop exploding tumors).
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post. Richard Thompson is a regular contributor to the Post.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB