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New Research Suggests the Appendix Has a Purpose After All (qz.com)
The appendix is an organ thought to have gone the way of our wisdom teeth and body hair: At one point we all needed them, now people can get by just fine without them. However, it turns out, at least the appendix has some purpose in the body. From a report: Scientists, though, have never been certain what the appendix used to do -- and if it is still, in fact, useless. On Jan. 9, a team of researchers led by scientists at Midwestern University Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine published a review study proposing an answer: the appendix is a secondary immune function that both catalyzes immune cell responses and floods your gut with beneficial bacteria when they've been depleted. And it still plays that role, in a limited fashion, in human body function."We can function okay without it, but the appendix does provide some degree of immunity and beneficial bacteria,â Heather Smith, an anatomist and lead author of the paper said.
You mean to tell me that something attached to other organs, that has blood vessels, that has metabolizing and reproducing cells, that has multiple cell types, that has nerve endings, actually has a purpose? Gee whiz next thing you'll be telling me that the tailbone has no function and we'd be A-OK if instead of something hitting your tailbone it hits the end of your spinal cord directly instead.
Because DNA of anything tends to carry legacies and evolve from previous similar things rather than just invent random stuff. Re-use is a large factor of DNA and it's complexity masks a lot of differences. That's why most diseases are NOT "just one dodgy gene".
This is why two testicles look similar to two ovaries, and why there's two of each, and why both sexes have pubic hair and anus in the same place, and why the female pelvis - though differing dimensions - isn't fucking octagonal or something.
And your gender is determined not in some magical early moment but quite late in foetal development, and not cast in stone as you're also surrounded by female hormones until birth.
More strange is why certain birds have such vastly different coloured/shaped/sized male/females.