Assumptions revisited

"Life is suffering" is a common simplistic approach to Buddhist teachings, "Life is learning" is one of my prefered approachs to existence. What I mean with this is that learning new stuff is one of the things that better manages to make me feel very alive.
Finding out that some of my previously acquired pieces of knowledge has been reshaped by science, experience or whatever, is something that I find terribly attractive.

In the last weeks I've came across a couple of these things:

• I had been taught that over the centuries that evolution moved the human larynx to a lower position to allow us produce a higher variety of sounds. In principle this feature was unique to humans, being one of the anatomical basis for our sophisticated language (and with it, one of the basis for our complexity as species). This descended larynx means that we can choke easier when eating, but this downside seems more than worth bearing in mind all the advantages that language gives us.
  Well, it seems larynx location is not that unique as we thought... In the interesting BBC Horizon documentary "Why do we talk?" they show that recent investigation in the University of Vienna seems to have proven that other animals are able to lower their larynx when barking, growling or whatever, but anyway they have not developed a basic talked language. They can dynamically lower down their larynx and reconfigure their vocal tract into a human like configuration, so the constraint that is keeping chimps or dogs from developing a basic vocal language is not an anatomical one, but purely a matter of brain configuration.
  
  
  
  This makes me thing that the evolutionary decision of lowering down our larynx was not a so clever one. I guess it would be better having it a bit upper, so we could not choke accidentally while eating, and then dynamically lower it down when we want to talk (well mannered people don't eat and talk at the same time :-D
  This should be no wonder, unfortunately evolution does not make big plans looking further into the future, it just picks the best solution that at a given moment random mutations provide us. As species and environment evolve, previous decisions could be not so fitting for the current scenario. I guess an "Intelligent designer" would be intelligent and generous enough to "design for the future" and give us solutions that would not look inappropiate after just a few milleniums... Would like to know what excuse creationists can make...
  


• Another common myth is the one that says that with respect to taste, our tongue is divided in several highly specialized areas, each of them responsible for sensign one specific taste. Well, this theory, commonly known as Tongue map seems to be absolutely false. I had already read about it sometime ago, and after watching the documentary about Taste in this interesting series of documentaries about The Human Senses (in Spanish language here) I felt compelled to check what wikipedia had to say about it.
  To sum up, this "Tongue map" theory has been disproven, and every part of the tongue includes receptors for every basic taste.