The human body's broken Vitamin C gene

Most animals are self-sustaining Vitamin C factories, but humans are running on a corrupted legacy codebase. We actually have the GULO gene—the biological "app" for manufacturing Vitamin C—but it’s permanently grayed out and broken.

Our ancestors ate so much fruit that evolution stopped maintaining our internal factory. It let the gene rot into a "pseudogene," a piece of junk code that does nothing.

Now, we’re one of the few mammals that will literally fall apart if we don't find an orange. It’s a hilarious hardware glitch that makes us dependent on groceries.

Wait, what does 'literally fall apart' actually look like in this glitchy system?

Vitamin C is the essential "glue" for collagen, the biological mortar holding your cells together. Without it, you stop producing the structural scaffolding that keeps your tissues from liquefying.

It’s horrifyingly cinematic. Old scars that healed decades ago will literally unzip and start bleeding again. Without new collagen to maintain the "patch," your body just forgets how to stay closed.

Your teeth wobble out of your gums and your blood vessels leak like burst pipes. It’s a total system crash just because a single dietary dependency wasn't met.

If it's such a fatal crash, why didn't evolution just patch the glitch?

It’s all about "server costs." Running a Vitamin C factory requires energy and raw materials. Evolution is a ruthless optimizer; it won't pay for a feature that the environment is already providing for free.

Without "quality control" to keep the gene functional, mutations piled up like typos in a document no one was proofreading. Since the ancestors stayed healthy, these typos were never caught or deleted.

By the time we left the jungle and actually needed that factory again, the source code was a garbled mess. Evolution has no "undo" button, so we're stuck with the broken version.

So are we the only species stuck with this garbage code?

Nope, we’re part of a very specific, very unlucky club. Guinea pigs, fruit bats, and some monkeys also have the exact same "404: Gene Not Found" error.

It happened to them for the same lazy reason: their ancestors lived in a literal buffet of Vitamin C. Evolution saw the surplus and decided to stop paying the subscription fee for the internal factory.

If you see a guinea pig munching a bell pepper, they’re in the same boat. We’re all just high-maintenance roommates forced to outsource our chemistry to the produce aisle.

What other essential "software" did evolution delete to save on energy costs?

Oh, we’re basically a "thin client" that offloaded all the heavy processing to the cloud. We actually lost the blueprints for nine essential amino acids—the basic Lego bricks of proteins—simply because our ancestors kept finding them in their "downloads" folder (food).

We also can't synthesize Vitamin B12 or Vitamin D efficiently. Instead of being self-contained survival pods, we’ve become high-maintenance biological shells that crash the moment the "external server" of the ecosystem goes offline.