Tegan Taylor

But we didn't discover that until the late 1950s, which is pretty late in the piece when it comes to hormones.

The idea that something that produces melatonin, which is such a buzzword at the moment, the idea that that would be useless is kind of crazy looking back.

I mean, if you look back in history, you see there's... When we started talking about evolution, especially, you know, Charles Darwin, a little later, Robert Weidersheim, these people who were trying to categorise how we evolved as different species...

And Charles Darwin listed a whole bunch of things that he said were vestigial.

And we've talked about most of them, ear muscles, wisdom teeth, appendix, tailbone, body hair, like you said.

Weidersheim published a book called The Structure of Man in the late 1800s, talking about 86 human organs he considered vestigial.

And one of them was, as you say, the pineal gland.

And the more we look at

the more we see about how useful some of these organs are that we might not have otherwise understood.

Like tonsils, for instance.

We used to kind of whip them out the minute they got infected in kids.

And now there's actually quite a high bar you've got to cross if you're going to have a tonsillectomy.

So you've still got your tonsils.

You obviously dodged that when you were a kid.

Luxury.

No, they're part of our immune system.

They're actually quite an important part of our lymphatic and immune system.

They kind of taste potential infections as they're coming into the body.

And so I suppose the standard of evidence is higher now than it used to be.

Like they still perform tonsillectomies, but you sort of have to have had a certain number of infections to a certain level of severity for your medical team to kind of go, okay, the risks have been outweighed by the benefits now.