Fast Fiction

Maybe there’s some clever evolutionist out there who can explain something to me about humans.

Why do nose hairs hurt so much when you pull them?

What is the evolutionary advantage to keeping people from yanking them out?

I can pull out hairs from my eyebrows or arm or leg (individually, I should specify, any large mass of hair at one time anywhere on your body hurts like a mofo) and it’s relatively painless - just a little pinch and it’s gone.

I pull out a nose hair and my eyes are spilling over.

What’s that all about? Was there a point in human development when people started pulling them out and those people didn’t survive as well, but the ones that had some sort of super pain-receptors in their noses survived better and passed along their genes to modern humans?

Why should the nose, that part of the nose, be so sensitive? It it to keep us from shoving things up there? To keep us from taking things out?