Talk:Vestigial Structures

This entry contains many unsupported claims about lack of functionality. This entry should be deleted if it is not greatly improved.--Aschlafly 11:23, 9 April 2007 (EDT)

Are you suggesting that ostriches and kiwi *can* fly? Chrysogonus 11:26, 9 April 2007 (EDT)

The sentence "Creationists usually claim that vestigial organs aren't really useless at all" is silly, because in fact it would make just as much sense to say that evolutionists make the same claim. If a structure serves no useful function, it is almost certainly adaptively negative because it requires some cost to support it. So organs with no function ought to get selected out.

Furthermore, it's presumptuous to suppose that we have a very complete understanding of physiology. The history of biology is replete with discoveries of important functions for things whose functions had previously been unknown. A classic example is color vision in animals: numerous animals have been thought not to have color vision, when the reality was that nobody had figured out how to set up an experiment that would test for it properly.

A lot of times, when a textbook says that (say) a human organ has no known function, it is no more than a medical observation that people can survive reasonably well without it. That doesn't really prove that the organ has no function, just that the organism as a whole is adaptable. Dpbsmith 12:17, 9 April 2007 (EDT)

Several definitions of "vestigial" are commonly used. Only one is presented here: apparent lack of function. Others include "reduced function" and "unknown function". These depend on POV. PrometheusX303 20:36, 27 June 2007 (EDT)

Article Move

Hey, thanks for combining these two articles. That really needed to be done. I noticed that you undid my recent edit in the process and was wondering if you had a problem with it or just did it on accident. The reason I made the change was that the sources cited on that last sentence do not support the statement made. Please see talk:Vestigial_structures in the section "human appendix" if you have questions about this point as it was actually settled some time ago. GodWarrior 22:03, 5 October 2007 (EDT)

No, it wasn't settled. More accurately, I failed to respond to your last post on the matter. Lack of response is not necessarily the same thing as agreement.

To provide a brief response to that post, whilst your facts are mostly correct, the weight you give them and the conclusions you draw are your interpretations, not facts themselves. For example, you describe one source as a "popular press magazine", which is correct, but overlooks that it is a science magazine, mainly written and read by scientists and people with scientific understanding. You say that two quotes are from the magazine writer and a person from South Africa known by name only. Actually, both answers would have been contributed by readers of the magazine, per the normal way that questions in this particular column are answered. But the magazine would not simply print any and all answers it gets; it would select the answers that it considers to be correct. True, still not a formally-peer-reviewed answer, but more substance than the impression that you give.

Nevertheless, I do think that the additional source that you provided has merit, and I will reinclude it in the article.

Philip J. Rayment 23:09, 7 October 2007 (EDT)