Almost fondly, given how amusing it all seems if you are old enough to remember when they were taken seriously. From a piece on how the concept of “pseudogenes” is likewise headed for the composter:
One central proof for unguided evolution that was offered for decades was “vestigial organs,” a variation on the junk-DNA myth. The evolutionary process supposedly littered our bodies with useless organs from our animal ancestry, just as it littered our cells with useless genes.
So ingrained was this idea of vestigial organs, it was common thinking among biologists for a century. Darwin started it, calling them “rudimentary organs” in both the Origin and The Descent of Man. He considered them difficulties for a design view, and predictions of natural selection. Robert Weidersheim made it his life’s work to catalog these evolutionary leftovers. In 1895, he published a list of over 100 body parts he deemed useless and non-functional. His list included the appendix, tonsils, wisdom teeth, and the coccyx. Even as late as the 1960s, tonsils were routinely removed from children on the grounds that they are unnecessary. When inflamed by infection, they can be harmful, but today’s family doctors know that, as part of the immune system, they are best left intact. Similarly, the appendix can be life-threatening when inflamed; but only within the last two decades have scientists come to realize that the appendix serves a vital function — that of “rebooting” the gut biota after diarrhea. Marcos Eberlin has made this point in his book Foresight and on a podcast for ID the Future. Similarly, wisdom teeth are best left in unless they are impacted. Some have argued that bad diet is behind our problems with third molars, not the supposition that the human jaw was shrinking and had no room for them, as Darwinians contended. And for sure, no one would want to sit down without a coccyx or tailbone! Important muscles are anchored to them, including muscles for elimination and childbirth.
Weidersheim’s list of vestigial organs has shrunk to very few today. He had included organs like the pituitary gland, spleen, and thymus gland whose vital functions were discovered later. Evolutionists should have deduced that the argument was flawed anyway; why would natural selection pay the energy cost of keeping useless organs around? The same applies to “junk DNA” — it makes no sense for a cell to keep copying and reading junk. And what is meant by “vestigial” in the first place? Humans can live without fingers, arms, and legs; are those vestigial? Some parts change during life history; they may be important in the embryo and then atrophy in the adult, or become functional after puberty, but are not “vestigial” at other times. Determining what constitutes a function can be subjective. On the whole, the vestigial organs argument is slippery: natural selection predicts many vestiges, but also predicts few vestiges.
Evolution News, “Pseudogenes Are Going the Way of Darwin’s “Rudimentary Organs”” at Evolution News and Science Today
But evidence was never really why Darwinism was so widely accepted in the first place. It has functioned more as a way of dismissing evidence. One can, for example, explain away the human mind by citing kinship with chimpanzees.
Denyse,
Good article. Thanks.
They ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
🙂
School: 1994 Poston junior high AP biology, The appendix is an artifact from the past it has no real function this is easily explained by evolution
2007 and 2014
The function of the appendix appears to be a safe house for bacteria necessary for resetting bacteria in the large intestine after Montezuma’s revenge
nearly 100% of mammals evolved with an appendix, and if it was useless evolution would’ve gotten rid of it along time ago
The above was taught to me in the beginning
The below is what actually happened
But remember, if we find function for every single gene, that would breathe life back into the stupidity of genetic determinism, and I am not keen on the idea of every decision we make, every belief that we have, is written in our genes
I feel that this is a double edge sword
” Evolutionists should have deduced that the argument was flawed anyway; why would natural selection pay the energy cost of keeping useless organs around? ”
Good point. I hadn’t thought of that. Tends to prove that the really important part of Darwinism is the randomness, not the natural selection. If they had been serious about energy cost, they would have started with the assumption that every EXISTING organ and behavior is necessary, whether we understand why or not.
The article in the OP had a link to this gem of a quote by Dr. Egnor:
Aristotle’s definition of chance reminded me of this from Stephen Talbott,
I never heard of Aristotle’s definition of chance before, but, as Egnor pointed out, it simply would be impossible to tell if something happened randomly by chance in a cell unless it happened within the ‘highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes’ of the cell.
There simply would be no backdrop in which to tell that an event occurred randomly or not without that backdrop of design. As Egnor pointed out, “Chance presupposes design.”
On top of that, when atheists claim that something “happened randomly by chance”, they are, in the vast majority of instances, appealing to “ignorance of the cause” instead of to any known cause and/or to any mathematically defined probability. Charles Darwin himself admitted as much,
Because of such ineptitude by Darwinists, (i.e. in using the word chance without any mathematically defined probabilistic context, and/or without an appeal to a known cause), Wolfgang Pauli himself stated that Darwinists, instead of being scientific, have become “very irrational”.
Yet, as Egnor pointed out, Darwinists cannot provide a mathematical context in which a chance event can be said to occur unless they first presuppose a purposeful context and/or universe in which the chance event can be said to occur. After all, randomly choosing a card from a deck necessarily presupposes a deck of cards that has been designed!
So it is very much a damned if you do, damned if you don’t, situation for Darwinists. If they refuse to rigidly define chance so as to become scientific they are, as Pauli put it, ‘very irrational’. But if, on the other hand, they rigidly define chance so as to try to become scientific, they must necessarily define that chance against a backdrop of purposeful design. Again, as Dr. Egnor succinctly summed it up, “Chance presupposes design.”