I’ve wondered about this, lets say someone has all of their wisdom teeth and they came it correctly because their jaw was big enough. If for some reason whether it be decay, trauma, etc. the person had to get one of their molars besides the wisdom tooth pulled, would the wisdom tooth just shift forward to fill in the gap? Is that the purpose of wisdom teeth?
I’m not a dentist, but wisdom teeth don’t have any specific “purpose” different from the other teeth. They chew stuff. Evolutionarily they are not a big advantage or disadvantage – you can get along fine without them (or, indeed, any small number of teeth). It’s true that they are harder to clean and therefore more prone to cavities in some people, but good dental hygeine is a fairly recent thing in the overall evolution of homo sapiens.
I have been led to believe that if any teeth are removed, the adjacent ones will tend to migrate into the gap; this is usually prevented by an artificial bridge of some sort. Otherwise the jaw and general face alignment may become deformed after a time.