Kent Dunlap
speaker
52 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kent Dunlap’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And some of those have been studied a lot, like owls and giraffes that I've mentioned, but there are others which are only just now beginning to be studied a lot. One example of that is whales, and the whales, even though their neck bones are often fused together, they have an amazing throat which allows them to take in a lot of water into their mouth, but then not swallow it down into their gut.
And just in the last few years, scientists have discovered this valve that separates the mouth and the esophagus, the food tube, which allows them to do this remarkable thing.
It barely does in terms of... the neck bones that separate the skull and the rest of the backbone, but it has down in the front of the neck, that is what we would call the throat, there's all sorts of complicated anatomies there involved with their feeding behavior.
That's right. I think that that's a good example of sort of the vulnerability of the neck that we all know very deep-seated. And when we want it, we can live with it. Often people do live with it if they've slept on their pillow wrong or something. But it's something that they persist through, but it's a constant nagging to them. Yeah, there are all sorts of expressions with a neck.
For example, a very close competition is a competition that's neck and neck. If you are dealing with a really ruthless person, they might go for the jugular. There are many other expressions that include the neck.
One of the things that drew me to the neck that I found very interesting is that why is it that this structure that's in our body is so vital and so crucial for existence and yet it's also so vulnerable? That is, why wouldn't natural selection and evolution sort of eliminated all those vulnerabilities?
And one of the things that's interesting is that the many features that the neck does, the many functions that the neck does, are sometimes competing with each other. So you can't optimize everything at once. Let me give you one example. Human speech is possible in part because we have a larynx, a voice box, which is situated relatively low in our throat compared to other animals.
And this position of the throat gives humans the capacity to make many, many different kinds of speech sounds. But on the other hand, this low position of the larynx also gives a lot of space above the vocal cords, above the voice box, which is susceptible to collapse. And a remarkably high number of people have sleep apnea, that is periods during their sleep when their breathing stops.
And we inherit this vulnerability to sleep apnea because we have this descended larynx leaving this space above the larynx that is so susceptible to collapse when we sleep.
It is remarkable and it even brings to the marvels of the respiratory system too because it's actually hard to suck a lot of air down a very long trachea, a very long windpipe. We know this is sort of true because we can't breathe out of very long snorkels. You may have noticed that all snorkels are relatively short. We don't dive 20 feet down underwater with a snorkel.
and that's because it's really hard to pull enough fresh air down that long pipe to get to our lungs. So this has been a big question about how very long-necked animals can pull in enough air down through that very long trachea.
Thank you very much, Mike. It's been a pleasure.
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