alt Hacker News> f. Nipples are useless in human males (cf. Ch. 5).
When I was a kid, I got my tonsils removed "because they were useless and a source of illness".
I've recently heard that tonsil removal is now more disputed: it may collect filth, sure, but it may also prevent it from going deeper into the body, which may cause more serious illnesses.
Given its vast complexity, and the timeline of its creation/evolution, I remain skeptical over bold claims about the human body. It's really missing an "as far as we know." The ability to go beyond what is known is paramount to the progress of science, and historically attested with some intensity (e.g. Earth's shape, relativity with time/space & axiomatic geometry). Humility thus feels like a better posture.
Who would let a junior dev trim bits, or boldly modify a decades old codebase?
There's also a difference between having no immediate use, and having no reason to exist. From what I understand, sexual differentiation works by having the Y chromosome act as a switch, and both sexes have to share the same blueprint with hormones guided the development of their organs.
For males not to have nipples, they'd need to be actively destroyed, which poses a risk for females to also not have nipples, which is much worse than males having harmless, inactive nipples.