The wording in this documents is a little too technical/hard for me, but as I understand it claims that the recurrent laryngeal nerve is not really a bad design.
For example if I understand it right, Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig claim that about 0.3 to 1% of the population does have a shortened laryngeal nerve (so it must have occurred already millions of times in all mammal species) but still it doesn't spread in the population, meaning that it doesn't really have a benefit and may even cause problems.
Another point that I would like to ask about this issue, when I look at the picture from Wikipedia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve.svg
I do see a short laryngeal nerve that looks like it goes directly from the brain to the laryngeal (the green nerve in the picture), what is the different between this nerve and the recurrent laryngeal nerve? Doesn't is serve the same purpose?
The documents that I linked to in my first post have more claims, I would be happy if someone can explain this claims in a more simple words, and say what are the arguments against it .
Thanks.
