Mouth and Anus: Two sides of the same blastosphere.

Why do babies put everything in their mouths? Anyone with children knows from experience that taste is a primary sense babies use to explore their environment, and sucking is innate (which makes the cigarette, BTW, such an ideal nicotine delivery method, and I suspect contributes to overeating and all sorts of other oral fixations).

But it occurred to me some time back, and it recently came up in conversation with brother Tom, that the mouth is probably the oldest biological fixture that forms in living things that have mouths. A quick search at Wikipedia confirmed this:

Embryological origins of the mouth and anus >

Without knowing much about the human nervous system, I’d wager the systems that control eating and swallowing are deep within the most rudimentary part of our brains and brain stems, which, when I was a boy, was called the “reptilian” brain, but might better be called something even further removed in our ancestry.

“Worm brain”?

As I recall from 7th grade biology, worms are essentially one long gut.

[2013-12-10]

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