Originally Posted by Gut Scrambler
So why do we still have appendixes and tonsils? It wasn’t so long ago that people would die from an infected appendix and they still would if it wasn’t for modern medicine. Tonsillitis is no bed of roses either. Both of these body parts serve no purpose but have the potential to effect our health.
You have to understand that medicine works in opposition to evolution. It basically prevents our species from adapting because it counteracts the effects of negative mutations and it detracts from the advantage of positive mutations. Thus, it leaves us not adaptive to a world that continues to change just as it always has. The other species continue to adapt to the changing conditions of the world but we do not. It is said that 99% of our development occurred over 10,000 years ago — a time when we were still participating in the game of survival of the fittest among individuals and species — the period where we, much like all other animals, had to constantly hunt for food in order to avoid hunger, fight and/or escape from predators and other humans, and did not live in insulated societies among other humans alone. In those days you had to be very healthy to persist. In stark contrast, these days you could have terrible mental illness but take medication that alleviates it, terrible vision but surgery or contact lenses, etc to fix it, weigh 800lbs and be unable to even walk but still survive, etc.
The tonsils are lymph node like tissues located right at the entrances to the body — the windpipe and esophagus. Their function is to provide early warning and production of antibodies and general immune response as they detect parasites, foreign bacteria, viruses entering the body. It is believed that they are very good at performing this function in nature but are poor at handling and somewhat subject to infection by the vastly broader range of assaults that occur in an urban environment. The reason evolution didn’t update them for the new environment and/or diminish them physically, is that they simply only became susceptible to infection relatively recently (after the development of cities), by which time doctors were already performing surgery and simply removing them. Thus, due to medicine, the gene pool, sexual mate selection, reproduction rates of individuals, are all oblivious to the somewhat maladaptive state of tonsils.
The appendix, much like the tail bone too, is also a vestige of our herbivore ancestors. It has been diminished by evolution as me moved from being herbivores to being carnivores who eat only a much more limited range of herbs than we once did. It has not been eliminated, once again, because no one will not have sex with you if you have an appendix because there is no way for them to see it, and because whenever the appendix becomes problematic, medicine simply either removes it or makes the problem go away with other treatments such as antibiotics.
