On 3/6/15, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
[Just us.]
We used to think that the spleen, the tonsils and the appendix were "junk organs".
We now know that the spleen & the tonsils are involved in the immune system, the spleen is involved in stockpiling red blood cells, and the appendix is involved in recreating the microbiome after dysentery-like diseases.
--you can live without these 3 organs. I do like the spleen and tonsils, but, I suspect the appendix is worse than junk in the sense you are actually better off on average without it. (Ditto wisdom teeth.) There is in many herbivores a region of their digestive system, the "caecum," in which cellulose-digesting microbes live. This enables them usefully to eat cellulose, which we humans cannot. Perhaps the appendix is a relic of that. Wisdom teeth are definitely a relic.
"Junk" is stuff that we don't _currently_ have a recognized use.
--there are example of two closely related animals (e.g. both similar frogs?) one has like 10X the DNA of the other frog. I do not care what you babble about possible unrecognized uses. This is junk. There is no way the 2nd frog has any reasonable unrecognized use for 10X more DNA which it suddenly developed in time epsilon. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)