The “Little Monkey Tail” and Other Vestigial Organs
Until a few years ago, evolutionary biologists deduced that many organs in the human organism that lacked apparent function must have been the result of evolutionary vestiges—senseless traits and organs that in a remote past would have served the species, but were currently completely useless leftovers.
In the beginning, scientists composed a list of about 180 vestigial organs for humans. But with the passage of years, and the discovery of respective functions for each one of these mystery organs, this list has gravely declined. These days, there does not exist any of the old organs that have not been identified as useful for man.
Even the coccyx, which was supposed to be the vestige of a simian tail, has been revealed to be an insertion point for the perineal muscles, an area of support for the gluteus, and an area of support for the pelvic cavity, among other functions. The same case is applied to the curious appendix, which currently is attributed with immunity functions; or the thyroid gland, director of bodily metabolism.
From Kneecap to Skeleton: An Extremely Hypothetical Path
Over the last several decades, paleontology has been lucky enough to dig up a great many tons of fossilized remains. The record on species of the remote past appeared to be growing year after year, enriching a culture searching for the origins and changes of all terrestrial plant and animal life. However, when revealed to the impartial analysis of the discovered evidence, the so called “evolutionary chains” of the different species do not seem to move much away from a simple theorization carried out for Darwinist scientists.
The first great inconvenience has been to view the evidence without evolutionist preconceptions and consider each species record as a unique piece, perhaps even unconnected with past and future species—a heretical notion for many investigators who are in a mad fervor to try and relate one species with another.
The result, expressed by the paleontologist Tim D. White, seems to sum up the situation paleontologists find themselves in: the blank spaces of the evolutionary chain are not completely filled; you fill a big space only to create two more small ones.
The product of this current of thought has led most of society to assume largely unproven concepts as absolute truths: that birds descended from reptiles; that humans descended from the “ape man,” etc.
Also consider the way in which the fossil record is reconstructed. Evidence from a prehistoric species constitutes some scarce pieces—such as teeth, skull fragments, kneecaps, ribs, etc. Even the external aspect and soft organs of these animals are reconstructed from these few fragments.
This practice led Stephen Gould, evolutionary geologist at Harvard, to state: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”
In fact, Charles Darwin himself confessed that his theory lacked sustainable fossil evidence, and he could not illustrate his book apart from mere artistic suggestions.
Perhaps the most well-known result in this line of thinking is the typical hominid chain of evolution, generally represented by an ape that appears with progressively shortened arms, while gradually gaining an erect posture, to culminate in a respectable and upright “homo sapiens” with white skin.
There is of course no actual knowledge of such, but this artistic rendition, with an end to making the sensation of gradual transition from one species to another, is what we have come to believe as a true picture of our ancestry. In reality, the definitive superficial aspect of each species has always remained a realm impossible for anthropologists to properly elucidate.
In the pursuit of realizing a more mature science, based on impartial observation and experimentation of change in the entire cosmic body, constructing step by step an open discipline, a science of rigor, and with the bravery to overturn any pre-established old theory (like Copernicus did in his time with geo-centrism, or with Einstein and Newtonian physics), in this way and only in this way, will men of science gain any hope of walking towards a truth that actually encompasses our wonderful universe.
