Ivellious wrote:The appendix is one such example.
Well the problem of course is that the appendix was shown to have a possible function as far back as
60 years ago.
And here is a recent study;
Your Appendix Could Save Your Life
"The Appendix serves as a storehouse for probiotics and also provides a variety of immune-related functions, helping to produce and train white blood cells, as well as playing an important role during fetal development."
The human tailbone is another "remnant" of evolution. In other animals there are examples such the wings on the Emu (a flightless bird).
Again this is just plain wrong
What is a Coccyx and What Does It Do
"It is used for the attachment of muscles, tendons, and ligaments which support the bones in our pelvis."
There are several possible reasons for the Emu's wings:
a) They derived from smaller birds that once could fly. This is possible in the creationist model. Loss of features is relatively easy by natural processes; acquisition of new characters, requiring new DNA information, is impossible.
b) The wings have a function. Some possible functions, depending on the species of flightless bird, are: balance while running, cooling in hot weather, warmth in cold weather, protection of the rib-cage in falls, mating rituals, scaring predators (I’ve seen emus run at perceived enemies of their chicks, mouth open and wings flapping), sheltering of chicks, etc. If the wings are useless, why are the muscles functional that allow these birds to move their wings?
c) It is a result of ‘design economy’ by the Creator. Humans use this with automobiles, for example. All models might have mounting points for air conditioning, power steering, etc. although not all have them. Likewise, all models tend to use the same wiring harness, although not all features are necessarily implemented in any one model. In using the same embryological blueprint for all birds, all birds will have wings.
As far as "vestigial DNA" goes, there are lots of examples. For instance, humans have a gene that codes for development of a fully funtional tail (like other primates), but the gene is simply deactivated or inhibited in humans. Chickens and other birds that we consider to be somewhat closely related to carnivorous dinosaurs have the genes for dinosaur-like teeth, but they are likewise no longer activated.
I am unfamiliar with the gene that codes for the development of a "fully functional tail", could you point me in the right direction.
Well the chicken gene has been known for some time, but it is only proof of evolution or common descent if you interpret it from that perspective. Creationists (and non) have known for some time that chickens contain such genes but it merely points to the fact that the bird from which the chicken decended had the ability to generate teeth. You must remember that before homology and the like was used as proof for evolution, creationists used it as evidence for a common designer.
In fact I remember hearing somewhere that a modern bird has teeth, think it was a hummingbird, I'll see if I can find the source.
It truely amazes me how some of these myths are continually recycled by the Darwin camp when many such claims as these have been proven to be false, some even decades ago.
It's the same with Haeckels embryo drawings and Othniel C. Marsh's false horse evolution sequence, I mean Haeckel was convicted of fraud in his very own university yet for some reason they are even referenced in modern text books. Why not create the modern day equivalent of the drawings -- no doubt because the results would not be what they had hoped for, so the best possible source remains one that was faked over a 100 years ago.
