Bushkin.

Hello, hello, everyone.

This is the first of what are going to be a couple of episodes in this mini-season

from my colleague Benadaph Haffrey.

Ben is the guy when you're hiking through the wilderness

who says, let's go this way.

And there's no trail.

And you think, oh, I'm going to get eaten by bears.

And then, no, you find some lost civilization

and large piles of glittering gold.

Ben started telling me this story,

and I stopped him halfway through, and I said,

Oh, Ben, this is a spandrel.

And what's a spandrel?

One of my all-time favorite concepts, invented by Stephen J. Gould.

The spandrel is the thing that doesn't have a function,

but which hangs around like a random hitchhiker because it happens to be riding along

with things that do have a function. Like your earlobs. I mean, what are they there for? Doesn't it seem

like they were all just along for the ride with the part of our ear that actually does useful things?

Or your chin. What's up with the chin?

We look at a spandrel and we assume there has to be a reason for it.

And there isn't.

...