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Asked by alexgabriel26 to Hayley, Sophie on 22 Mar 2013.
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Sophie Holles answered on 22 Mar 2013:
We can already live without hearts! We’ve invented artificial hearts that can pump our blood around. But I don’t think we’ll ever evolve to naturally not need a heart.. because all the cells in our bodies rely on the oxygen and nutrients that get pumped to them and then take away all the waste products via the blood which is pushed around by our heart. So if we somehow evolved to survive without our blood moving around, then we’d be a different species! There are alternative methods, like insects get oxygen to all their cells by lots of tiny air tubes through their bodies, but that limits their size and is why giant insects the size of us can’t exist.
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Hayley Evers-King answered on 22 Mar 2013:
It’s possible, lots of big things have happened to change life over evolutionary timescales. But I don’t think it’s likely, a heart and the circulatory system like ours seems to work very well for lots of animals, so unless a mutation happens that makes our hearts start to work very differently (and much better in some way, like helping us live a lot longer/powering our bodies more effectively) it’s unlikely that it will evolve away any time soon.
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