Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/the-appendix-is-not-a-useless.html
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I thought its purpose was to be a reservoir for gut bacteria to help them ride out episodes of diarrhea and give them a foothold to recolonize the gut once you’re healthy again. At least that’s what I learned in school some 20 years ago. Is this a controversial opinion?
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Nope, that’s what I learned in med school, although that was a bit more than 20 years ago!
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Then it’s not an appendix, but a part of the main body?
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This seems like a pattern with any body part that is basically a little dead-end pocket (tonsils, gall bladders, appendices, sinuses) – the popular wisdom is “you don’t need that cos it doesn’t do anything”, based on an early-20th-century engineering mindset where things are understood as a flowchart where everything has inputs, outputs and a self-contained Function. That thinking is not well-equipped to understand little gnarls and curlicues that passively modulate the working of the overall system.
It’s the same thinking that leads people to persistently dismiss (for example) the economic importance of unwaged labor or the arts. Most real science and engineering has moved past thinking like this, but I think the public cling to it because it justifies authoritarian, daddy-centric hierarchies.
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And it may (or may not) be a reservoir for something else…
Yes it’s a year old, but oddly enough I only came across it a couple of days ago.
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Sure, but what has it done for me lately?
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The appendix is not a useless organ
But apparently the brain is…
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I’m appending right now!
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That’s all well and good until it tries to kill you.
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But what do medical researchers think of the footnote?
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May I join you in forming your appendices?
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Old news. It contains the human soul:
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You mean . . . . . I’m soulless? 
Of course, that explains a lot.
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Mine might be. Fuel mileage varies though.
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Yeah, well wait until you’re in your 60’s brother, then the milage really varies.
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Getting close…brain still trips me up.
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Well, mine is useless, since it was removed from the rest of me a year ago. But it did try to kill me, so fair is fair.
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You are Don Simmons, and I claim my €5!
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