Medical science is one of the only reasons I'm happy to be alive now and not during other times. Everything else is absolute shit, but our ability to manage and cure disease and the like is amazing.

This is what gets me about the sentiment of "humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without toothpaste/sunscreen/antibiotics/vaccines/etc and we were just fine!"

My dude, we were most definitely not fine. A lot of people died painful and preventable deaths, many of them children, and we're around today because existing that way was just good enough to keep us going as a species.

Evolutionarily, it only matters that you reproduce.

It means that humans developed empathy and the scientific means to help each other avoid natural selection. Intraspecies and interspecies empathy is the cheat code against natural selection. Certain ram species, for example, also were not designed intelligently, so as they age they may grow their horns until they penetrate their skull and kill them. Natural selection is most effective when it culls prior to the life form procreating. However, thanks to the power of empathy, we can abate natural selection by performing oral surgery on humans (ideally in our adolescence for wisdom teeth removal) and by shaving rams’ horns as they age. Ideally, as science develops and empathy spreads, we can come up with more effective and painless means to ensure everybody has a chance to live and be happy.

Me: does nothing

Evolution: fuck you

Pre-dentistry, a bunch of your teeth would have fallen out before your wisdom teeth came in. There would have been space for the wisdom teeth so they wouldn't need to come in sideways.