The Flawed Maw

Why don't teeth grow back? I currently have all my teeth (except those pesky wisdom ones), but the world is a strange and violent place, and I can imagine many circumstances where I could lose one tooth, two teeth, or pieces of several. I would feel much more comfortable wandering through an industrial manufacturing facility, for example, if I knew that all damage I received from various blows to the head by robot arms could be repaired.

Of course, now that I think about it, eyes don't grow back, either. But I don't really expect a gouged eye to grow back. I guess I just don't think about them in the same way.

I imagine most people, like me, think of teeth as either mouth-housed fingernails or extensions of their bone structure. And both nails and bones tend to repair themselves. You're actually supposed to break off(or clip, if you must) pieces of your fingernails from time to time. And I know from personal experience that a severely damaged/removed toenail will grow right back to its original state with enough time. Given, bones won't grow back if they're completely amputated (for most of us, anyway), but you can put two halves of a broken bone together and they'll at least knit themselves solid again.

But teeth, those bastard step-children of the skeletal system, get short shrift when it comes to regenerative genetics. If they break, they break. Humans are then forced to replace them with pieces of wood, plastic, lead, gold, or whatever else happens to be lying around.

Generally, it seems like the human body is a pretty clever construct, but when we ultimately have to rely on reason and tool-making to accomplish a thing as basic as eating, I don't know. It seems like one of our evolutionary engineers may have dropped the ball.

I guess I just have to cross my fingers and hope we always have a sizable population of dentists. I just couldn't call myself a man if I was forced to exist only on smoothies and various slurried meats.