Saturday, March 31, 2018

Vestigial Us

The towel act described briefly in yesterday's post can be seen on youtube.  While it is another comedy team, it is the same fun.  This is thanks to Marina:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5411cS2P43E

I wondered yesterday how we still have so much hair on our bodies - 5 million hairs. This seems like a lot of follicles that aren't of use anymore.  It is considered one of the aspects of human evolution where there are DNA 'leftovers' - vestigial structures.

These include wisdom teeth, hiccups, the pink tissue in the eye (leftover from a third eyelid), ear wiggle, lip twitching (left over from when we would bare our teeth), the human tail bone, and goosebumps - when we had hair this made us look bigger.  The list and description of twelve of these can be found HERE and the Wikipedia article is HERE.  There are many items listed in the Wikipedia article.

It was thought that the appendix was vestigial, but it now may be considered to have a purpose in our immune system to protect good bacteria in the gut.


I thought there must be some funny evolutionary jokes - that is jokes about evolution.  But I found only one article with satirical evolution jokes/cartoons - a bored panda article HERE.  Otherwise, there seem to be few evolution jokes, but there are lots of Easter Bunny jokes: 

How do you know the Easter Bunny is really smart? 
Because he's an egghead. 

How do bunnies stay healthy? 
Eggercise 

What do you call a mischievous egg? 
A practical yolker 

What's the difference between a bunny and a lumberjack?
One chews and hops, the other hews and chops.

Why didn't the easter egg cross the road?
Because he wasn't a chicken yet! 

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