In fact, even Charles Darwin said the appendix is a “vestigial organ,” or one that has become essentially useless over time — a concept that is still spouted in biology textbooks to this day.
Recently, however, researchers from Duke University Medical Center have made a very good case for why your appendix may actually be incredibly important. Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, they point out that an appendix “has been maintained in mammalian evolution for 80 million years or longer.”
The fact that it has been around for so long, surviving species changes and also existing in a wide variety of species (70 percent of all primate and rodent groups contain species with an appendix, according to the Duke researchers) suggests it plays a critical function in survival … but what?
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