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Are you suggesting that ostriches and kiwi *can* fly? [[User:Chrysogonus|Chrysogonus]] 11:26, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
Are you suggesting that ostriches and kiwi *can* fly? [[User:Chrysogonus|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. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 12:17, 9 April 2007 (EDT)