I have been living on Tylenol for the past two days. My wisdom teeth have started to emerge from my lower jaw. The upper ones have been no trouble. The lower left one was no trouble either. However, the lower right one refuses to behave like his brothers. It is an eruption of pain. Day before yesterday I woke up with this throbbing pain in my lower jaw. I took some Tylenol and the pain went away. Next morning, I woke up with ever more terrible pain. It felt like someone had stuck a javelin through my lower jaw. I lay moaning in bed for about 15 minutes before I staggered to the bathroom and got myself more Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. This morning it seems to be slightly better. Here you go, Creationists. Try and explain this one. Why did you oh-so-perfect Creator create us with useless wisdom teeth? He didn't even give us a jaw big enough to hold it. Pretty near-sighted, if you ask me.
I have a better idea. They are remnants of our plant eating past. When we evolved from being strictly herbivores to becoming omnivores, we didn't need to grind plant matter so much. This weakened jaw muscles. Jaw muscles are anchored to the skull and since they were weakened, this let the skull grow even more since the jaw muscles aren't squeezing it. Ergo, bigger brain. However, we still have the legacy code (excuse the programming analogy) for the wisdom teeth in our DNA. The code obviously doesn't care that we have a smaller jaw, so it decides to express itself anyway.
I hear that some people get a healthy set. I think I might. It is only the lower right one that is causing me trouble now. In other people, they come up in horrible ways. Sideways, backward, sideways and backward... Horrifying thought.