Why can’t the body regrow lost teeth and eyes but Teratoma tumors can grow those even in places in the body that aren’t supposed to grow?
In: 6
Short answer: Nothing is “stopping” the body from regrowing teeth.
Long answer: Natural selection dictates whether or not your body does something. The ability to “regrow” a tooth from stem cells is possible, as evidenced by teratoma tumors. The reason we don’t regrow lost teeth is because it wasn’t evolutionarily beneficial to do so.
The most likely reason is that from our body’s perspective, we are supposed to reproduce at a young age. At a young age, you are likely to have all of your teeth. There is no benefit to regrowing teeth after reproduction, because all that matters from an evolutionary perspective is traits that cause you to be more likely to pass your genes down. Natural selection led to the idea that one well-aligned and strong set of teeth was more beneficial than maintaining the ability to regrow a tooth.
So the answer lies with necessity. Humans never needed to regrow teeth because we rarely lose them enough to not function properly, sharks for example continually regrow teeth because they really entirely in their mouths to hunt and eat food but apes have basically always used their hands as well as tools to gather food and prepare it to cause less strain on our bodies. For a medical explanation it’s as simple as sometimes cells get lost on their way to the correct area when we’re still a fetus, and because these cells are programmed to do one thing they end up causing small problems like teratoma
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