Guillaume Lecointre is a professor of the National Museum of Natural History. Zoologist and systemician, he devotes his work to the classification of the living. In his Small treaty of superfluous anatomy (Delachaux and Niestlé, 240 pages, 25.90 euros), published in September 2024, he uses the human body as a window on evolution, beating some well anchored opinions.
The human body is often presented as what the evolution has done most perfect. The man of Vitruve, of Leonardo da Vinci, writes both in a square and a circle, is the symbol. Is this vision misleading?
Art has magnified the human body and normalized medicine. The organs are necessarily used for something and must work well. When we are sick, we repair what is wrong. However, there are around thirty structures in the human body that all or part of the population has and which are useless, others which are useful but which are strangely constituted, which sometimes even handicap us. For example, on the bottom of the sternum, there is a small point called the “Xiphoid process” of the sternum. Some people of the population do not have it and do not harm it worse. To others, there is a lack of the twelfth pair of ribs, and there too, they suffer in no way. This is proof that it is useless.
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