General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "Pope doesn't come over to where you work and slap Jamie Dimon's dick out of your mouth." [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)Aside from the "use only a little of our brain" thing in the other reply, there's a few other problems.
First, our other organs don't operate at 100% all the time. Your lungs aren't running at capacity unless you've been exerting yourself recently. Your kidneys crank themselves up and down based on your blood chemistry.
Second, Junk DNA serves a purpose. The vast majority of mutations are bad - they make something that works no longer work. Junk DNA provides space for mutation to result in "new" genes while not damaging the "old" ones. (Assuming Junk DNA turns out to actually be junk.) Also, most other complex species have lots of "Junk DNA". It's not unique to humans. The only place we don't find much Junk DNA is in bacteria, but even they have "non-coding regions". In bacteria, we think it's to provide space for the decoding proteins to attach to the DNA.
But the larger problem is you are trying to apply logic and thoughtful design to evolution. Evolution is caused by chance. So a "better" system may have simply not appeared. We still have an appendix because not having one just didn't come up. We are talking about only ~400k years for humans to be "tweaked", and such a small amount of waste that is the appendix does not create much evolutionary pressure.
Or a better system could have appeared but other factors overwhelmed the improvements. Ancient humans that did away with the appendix may have been slaughtered by a neighboring tribe or died in a famine caused by a drought.