eli5 How was a whole organ’s usefulness unknown for such a long time(appendix)?
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Anatomists are a funny bunch. Their job is to map and name every little lump and bump in the body. That gets put in a list for some medical student to memorize but it doesn’t always clear, mechanically, why that lump or bump exists.
The appendix is like your intestines’ coin purse. If you look at it, it’s a little sack that doesn’t go anywhere and the main thing that we generally associate it with is when it is infected and killing us. Seems like a worthless little pouch.
Looking at all the other animal species out there, a great many have the fuller version of the appendix called a cecum. The larger size of their organ and how it’s distributed in the body gives us a general sense that that’s where our appendix came from and that there is a functional use for it. But as we’ve come to claim, ours is small so we probably don’t need it anymore. It’s vestigial.
About 10 years ago gastroenterologists stopped laughing at the idea of a fecal transplant. Some still do, but from the peer-reviewed scientific community all of a sudden we were starting to look at our own intestinal microbiome not only as a funny component of our bodies, but actually as its own organ system that we relied on. That’s a whole body system that were only now just considering in very recent time. Another one is the space just under the skin that doesn’t present as an obvious organ system and yet has important function that’s largely been overlooked by the flashier, meatier organs.
So the answer to your question is that, taken as an offshoot of the gastrointestinal system, the appendix is not functionally interesting nor does it appear to do much. However, taken as a component of the intestinal microbial organ, a system that is relatively new in its scientific interest, appendix likely still does have function. We’re just figuring that out now.
As an aside, I consider the appendix to be like that sourdough starter jar sitting in your refrigerator. Following a diarrheal blowout decimating your microflora, it’s nice to have a normal population stuck outside of the normal transit lane to be able to reseed the highway, so to speak.
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