Today, while reading my biology textbook for homework, I had an epiphany.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, proposed to the world in 1809 that changes in an environment caused an organism's behavior to change, leading to greater use or disuse of a structure or organ. The structure would become larger or smaller as a result, and that these changes would be passed on to an organism's offspring.
Observations by Charles Darwin on his voyages to the Galapagos Island revealed that though the islands were very similar in climate and geology, the animals that inhabited each island were completely and totally different. Darwin concluded that this must because animals migrated there from South Africa, separately, to each island, and slowly, started adapting, and evolving to meet the needs of survival on their particular island.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like to propose a new idea. A radical idea, one that would change the way we think about the world.
You know that small thing we have inside ourselves, the appendix?
Truthfully, it serves little purpose to us.
It has been suggested that the appendix is a lymphatic organ, rich in lymphoid tissue, necessary to create lymphoid cells that fight off viruses and invaders to the body.
However, it can be removed, and no one is exactly sure of what it does now.
But this is NOW.
What about THEN?
What if the mammals, near the time of the age of dinosaurs, had the ability. to breathe. fire.
It was no meteor that killed the dinosaurs. It was no ice age.
IT WAS THE MONKEYS THAT RAN AROUND BREATHING FIRE.
After the monkeys had completed their genocide of the dinosaurs that had terrorized the world for eras, most of the monkey population settled in peace around the world, and stopped using their fire-breath-inducing appendix. Eventually, their appendix shrunk and lost it's function as the monkeys evolved, and became an organ aiding the immune system as we became humans.
The rest of the monkeys that did NOT want to stop breathing fire would begin to shed their fur and live in tropical climates, developing a cold-blooded body and scales, and later becoming what we believe to be dragons. Later, the dragons migrated to the Europe and East Asia from the equator zone, the locations of many dragon myths.
While dragon-monkeys evolved, one group of monkeys, smarter than the rest of the peace-monkeys, decided to make the harsh pilgrimmage to what would be known as the Mayan civilization, in order to get away from the stupid ones.
Their journey was harsh, climbing mountains, fighting off dragon-monkeys, traveling without food for days at a time. They eventually had to adapt to their environment, they had to evolve, just as Lamarck and Darwin demanded it.
So they developed ESP. They developed the power to SEE INTO THE FUTURE (near future, mind you). This ability greatly ensured their survival as they traveled.
Finally, when they reached the coast of Texas, where the land and food was plentiful, some of them realized that they had actually gone off their original course. Others just didn't care about going to Maya anymore and just wanted to stay in Texas, where they would be ensured a lifetime of happiness rather than make another harsh and desperate trip to Southern Mexico.
And so, the group split up again, half of them traveling southward, the rest staying for luxury. The journey was completed much faster due to less supplies needed to be consumed by less monkeys. By this time, the monkeys were almost human, and they had reproduced to make several generations, and their ESP was growing stronger with each new generation.
By the time they reached their destination, their ESP had become so powerful that they had foreseen the horrible death that would come to all of life on Earth by December 21, 2012, as well as having developed a revolutionary planetary-based calendar system.
And so, they planned ahead, creating their calendar and purposefully stopping at 2012, to give humanity a warning of what was to come.
Then most of the Mayans, now almost completely human, died because of overworking on developing the calendar, and the rest died because they had ended up in-breeding within families too much, and they became susceptible to a deadly disease, what was to become known as HIV.
While this was happening, the monkeys in Texas lost their ESP slowly while becoming humans. However, most Texans still retain their ninja-like reflexes and ability to see within the near future.
There are firebreathers out there, humans with mutated appendixes that still allow them to breathe fire. The genetic code has not been completely lost.
And that is the story of why our appendixes are small.
~BKH
