Really? This is what one of the authors would think of what you said:
“The creationists have misinterpreted, either mistakenly or deliberately, our work,” Laurin says. “I was horrified when I found out what they wrote about my paper. And since I’m the author, I can tell you it’s a very severe misinterpretation when they stated that our results indicated that the appendix had no evolutionary pattern.”
What do you think of Laurin’s statement?
All in all, what is your main point at this point? What is your hypothesis? What justifies your analysis of a single statement in a paper to be more valid than multiple authors with doctorates in relevant fields that spent years analyzing data?
You have singled in on one statement from their paper while ignoring most of it. How about we check out Laurin’s 2017 paper too on the appendix:
Morphological evolution of the mammalian cecum and cecal appendix
There are several highlights I suppose but:
The great differences in evolutionary rates, and especially the high evolutionary rate of the cecal appendix in Euarchontoglires, support our earlier suggestion (Laurin et al.,2011; Smith et al.,2013) that this character is a recurrent phenotype. It is particularly recurrent within Euarchontoglires, with numerous transitions in rodents and primates, and it is essentially ubiquitous in lagomorphs. Interestingly, the heterogeneous pattern of this recurrence appears to be explained better by the phylogeny than by the ecological factors tested.
The appendix does appear is nested hierarchies determines via other means with a few interesting appearances. If you reject nested hierarchies, then you don’t have any argument to begin with I think.
As for the appendix being vestigial, that’s hard to say. For the 12 species who lost the appendix it certainly was for them for a time before it was gone altogether. And while it serves some purpose for humans, it’s hard to imagine it faces any selection pressure for us anymore (though it clearly once did as the paper establishes very well- the appendix is NOT vestigial for mammals as a whole and has some use for us, but for many mammals they lost it entirely as it was vestigial and then disappeared).
Also, that’s my fault entirely. I apologize for my presumption. The appendix and vestigial structures/genes in general as misunderstood and misused by many anti-evolutionary creationists (I notice you put it in quotes most likely because you reject the possibility of being an evolutionary creationist). I wrong assumed you were just parroting their common arguments.