My attention has been captured by news about items, many of them human body parts, we recently thought were useless, and now know otherwise. My favorite is “junk” DNA, because I called that one early. Despite my lowly status as a mere BS in biomedical engineering, throughout my adult life I have resolutely asserted that nature does not create waste, and we simply must not know what most of our DNA does. Since I spent most of my life in clinician-rife Brookline, this subjected me to disdain, incredulity, or ridicule from numerous MDs in social situations. Now junk DNA is called “noncoding” DNA–pretty much a sore loser name–and at least five serious functions have been identified, with more I am certain on the way. 

I’ve had similar thoughts about the appendix, so I was super happy when it turned out that it does something I very much appreciate: store a copy of our gut microbiome. I had wondered how our gut MB could be both so crucial to health and so easily disrupted by things we sometimes consume, so I was thrilled to learn it’s backed up.

I was an early victim of the mistaken notion that tonsils, a perimeter defense for our lungs and antibody producer for our throats,  provide no function, as well as of the way-wrong opinion that formula was just as healthy as breast milk. I like to imagine I would have been taller, smarter, allergy-free, and maybe even not-myopic without these early interventions.

It was the fifties. I do miss that income distribution.

I was recently advised to wear a 2 mm heel lift because I have a discrepancy of 6 mm, about a quarter inch, between the lengths of my legs. 70% of the population has a discrepancy of between 1 and 60 mm. When humans were mostly walking on beaches, trails, and rocks, a small difference didn’t matter, but it’s considered pathological now because we spend so much time on floors, sidewalks, and other essentially flat surfaces, so a discrepancy may affect our backs or posture. Does it, though? I haven’t noticed a problem, or a difference since I started wearing the lift.

I still walk barefoot on the sand. 

Eyebrows seem obviously placed to divert liquids that run down our faces around our eyes, but I recently read that people have more trouble identifying pictures of celebrities with their eyebrows removed than pictures with their eyes removed, so eyebrows may play a role in recognizing faces, especially those faces with unibrows.

All our teeth, including the Wise Ones, fit easily into our jaws until we adopted agriculture, which is also when our brains started shrinking. I believe as the cranium shrank, the jaw breadth shrank as well, though not, apparently, the teeth. This is hard to find information about, because humans, even scientists are, as it turns out, Very Sensitive about the possibility that we are becoming dumber as time goes on. 

Even though we keep deciding things are useless when they aren’t.