For something so important to the body, why is our body unable to produce oxygen? The simple answer is that it hasn’t needed to.
We can breathe in what we need from the air around us. We’d be in a lot of trouble if we ended up in an environment without oxygen, but 99.99% of us don’t die of suffocation, so it’s good enough. Even if it were possible to evolve an organ that produced enough oxygen to get by, that organ would need resources, and increasing our daily calorie count/nutrition requirements would likely have killed more humans via starvation than being able to breath underwater or while being strangled would have saved.
Similarly, we’ve been able to get enough vitamins from our diets to get by for the entire history of our species. Could we have evolved ways to produce them? Probably, but we’d still have to eat more of the ingredients for them. If we can just eat them, it’s easier to do that.
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