If its useless and has the potential to kill you why don’t we evolve to live without our appendix?
There’s a good chance we are. But you have to remember that evolution is slow (uh-oh, did I just set off a “punctuated equilibrium” debate?).
If having appendices makes the appendex-owner substantially more likely to die before reproducing (which is possible), then there would be evolutionary pressure to eliminate the appendix. That is, individuals with mutations that make the appendix a) vestigal, smaller or completely absent and/or b) less likely to become infected and rupture would be more likely to reproduce, and thus, each succeeding generation would have a larger population of the appendix-less.
But we’re talking about a process that would take millions of years, here. If you’re hoping to shake hands with your appendix-free grandkids, you’re out of luck.
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
We can live quite well without our appendix. The Wife is still going after twenty years.
Or, are you asking why we still have an appendix? That would be because it doesn’t affect enough people at an early enough age to have an influence on inheritance. If appendicitis stuck say, thirty percent of all humans before they reached 14 years of age, that would be selective pressure to eliminate it. But, more likely, the species would just go extinct in a few generations.
Basically, as it does not affect enough people enough to interfere with breeding, it is going to tag along with us until we remove it from our genome manually.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
Zu diesem Projekt ist derzeit noch kein Abstract verfügbar.
I had mine remove manually, but the doctor’s name was Stanley, not Gerome.
The veriform appendix? Who knows what it’s for. It’s just a little extra piece of intestine I guess. Maybe its a vestigal thing like that little tail bone you have at the bottom of your spine [coccyx [sp]], which indicates we used to have a tail.
I’ve always heard of it, but I’ve also always wondered just what exactly it was appending. My intestines?
Wait… I bet that’s the little bugs in my gut keep their bibliography of everything I eat.
Yeah, but just wait till they start cross-indexing your ass. Is that a pain!
I recall some time ago reading in a Discovery-type magazine that there were some new discoveries that indicated that the vermiform appendix had some minor role to play in the immune system. More details next month – of course there weren’t.
Anybody know anything about this?
Thank you Polycarp, for jogging my memory. I had read that the appendix produces B lymphocytes and antibodies in young adults. And, lo and behold, I remembered something correctly (for once), according to this expert at the Scientific America website.
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/medicine/medicine8.html