Cancer happens too… So are cells which develop cancer vestigial?
I agree this is distracting. However since you claimed that saying the appendix is not vestigial is “anti-evolution” etc… I wanted to make the current scientific situation absolutely clear.
For your claim to be valid. You have to prove the below.
That the appendix had an important function that disappeared.
Can you cite papers showing what it was…
As far as I understand Darwin’s argument. He assumed the appendix was a cecum that had become useless in apes and human beings because we consume less cellulose. This does not seem to be the case.
As to evolution being falsifiable. My main point is that it is inherently unfalsifiable.Aspects connected to evolution can be proven wrong (such as neo Darwinism). But not the over arching idea…
Hence I feel it’s more of a philosophy than a theory.
I would love it if you could point to some actual scenarios that would falsify evolution.
Other than rabbits in the pre- Cambrian… with an added disclaimer that discounts all practical challenges.
So a vestigial gene or organ again is one that has since lost its main function or purpose that it once had (all or at least some of it). Cancer would not fit that category at all so no, cancer is not a vestigial gene or organ for human beings.
It seems that the appendix is quite more interesting than I imagined! So I do genuinely thank you for helping to learn more about it. This paper is quite interesting to me and I think relevant for what I want to say next: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631068312001960
That paper suggests 32 independent appearances of the appendix, 7 of which have been lost completely. But out of the 361 mammalian species included in the analysis, only 50 actually have an appendix. If it’s so useful, then why did not more lineages get it and keep it? Certainly though whatever Darwin thought about it was wrong. It’s certainly less clear whether it fits the true vestigial structure as it would be dependent on each species. But…
Who cares what Darwin thought exactly? I mean I get that you are in part arguing against Darwin’s ideas on the appendix which are certainly more complex and nuanced than he could have ever known. He was a smart guy, but I have found this odd tendency for folks to kind of well argue against the theory of evolution based off of what he said over a hundred years ago. As nicely outlined in this blog post:
It’s a valid question… I could also ask, if intelligence is so useful, why are there not more species as intelligent as human beings…
If the opposable thumbs is so useful… Etc etc…
I am sure that if you think about it, you can easily formulate an “evolutionary” explanation.
From the creationist POV (which we share , if not in the details)… The basic answer would be …
God created diversity.
The only explanation that I could find for the function of the appendix that was lost was Darwin’s… If somebody else identified the original function of the appendix, that got lost… I would love to learn.
I also think you have the concept of evidence a bit wrong. The whole point is that we inherited our appendix from our ancestors, and that is true whether the appendix has important function or a very unimportant function. We still observe a nested hierarchy of shared features which is what evidences common ancestry and evolution. If humans had feathers that would be evidence against evolution, whether those feathers are vestigial or provide a vital function.
Darwin proposed that organs which fell into disuse would accumulate changes that shrink the size of the organ or cause it to lose the function it had in the ancestral populations. Darwin thought that the human appendix was an example of this process. Whether the human appendix turns out to be a result of this process or not has little to do with the possibility of this evolutionary pathway occurring.
I agree. I have already stated that evolution will not be falsified even if all vestigial organs turn out not to be vestigial.
We had to go into this long discussion because @pevaquark was of the opinion that claiming the appendix is non-vestigial was anti-evolutionary nonsense. So I had to establish that there is scientific reason for making this claim.
Things like feathers in human beings happen often in evolution. It’s doesn’t falsify it in any way. It’s called convergent evolution.
Can you show us what it would look like to make God a scientific hypothesis? By what mechanisms does He interact? How can we build models that describe exactly what He does and does not do? When you do this, then it can make sense to call the handiwork of God science.
What are you referring to? We certainly do not spontaneously generate the genes for making feathers. Do you mean atavisms?
This was my main point before. Where do you get this idea from? My point before, asking about vestigial organs or genes is that you have a very similar understanding of them to most anti-evolution literature. Most anti-evolutionists commonly believe and write that vestigial structures cannot have any use/function/purpose. Therefore they use anything that is/was labeled as vestigial, find some potential use, and then write their anti-evolution article. Some may not have any function (i.e. remnants of the GULO gene that cannot make Vitamin C for us- that would be a vestigial gene) but others may have greatly reduced function or have a different function than what they once had. Vestigial structures can certainly be complex but it is a myth that they cannot have any function- that was my point all along. I apologize for confusion of what my main point was.
By God, we mean an immaterial, intelligent consciousness that is infinite in nature. Hypothesis can be made involving God.
ID theorists have tried to make predictions of things that result from intelligence being found in nature. Information is something that is demonstrated to arise from intelligence…
So that would be one prediction that is already verified.
The mathematical/logical nature of the universe would also be predicted by intelligence… so that’s another one.
It’s not very difficult.
Immaterial phenomenon such as consciousness interacting with matter would also be a prediction because God is assumed to be immaterial.
I don’t mean Atavism. I was referring to the concept he pointed to… of evolutionary features such as feathers being found in places not predicted by the evolutionary tree. This happens often enough to have a name for it- convergent evolution.
My main point has always been that both sets of facts can and will be explained through evolution. If something is vestigial , it supports evolution. If it is not… then it evolved.
Hence facts like vestigiality or non vestigiality cannot falsify evolution… no fact really can.
There are definitely vestigial features. The toenails on manatees are a good example. The extensor coccygis muscle in the human tailbone spans a fused joint and is definitely vestigial because it no longer lifts a tail as it does in other species. These features are evidence for evolution because they follow the expected phylogeny. You don’t find mammals with vestigial feathers, or birds with vestigial mammary glands, as two examples.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Saying that an organ is not vestigial because it has function is usually the anti-evolutionary nonsense we are talking about. No one has ever said that a vestigial feature can have no functional at all. A vestigial feature can still have a secondary or rudimentary function and still be vestigial.
Feathers in humans would not be convergent evolution. Convergent evolution produces analogs, not homologs. The bird wing and bat wing are convergent adaptations, but those wings are obviously not homologous.
Except that we see the same genes involved in the same function in unrelated organisms… people call it convergent evolution, parallel evolution etc.
There are papers which say the appendix came and went 32 times in mammals… and it’s not only the appendix.
The eye seems to have evolved several times. Though some instances are that of different mechanisms creating similar result, some are homologous genes/biomolecules etc.
On the other hand we have things like hair/fur in mammals which remain constant through 100’s of millions of years… even though there are close alternatives like scales, feathers etc which could have arisen, considering the diversity achieved by this group.
Considering that species change by both dropping as well as gaining traits, it’s very difficult to see how some specific traits remain conserved for immense durations while others don’t (and it’s this consistent conservation across time involving immense change in other genes which creates nested heirarchies)… and even these traits are not common throughout life… they vary from class to class…
Edit: one example for a naturally occurring nested heirarxhy in biologicals systems is embryo development. It leads to cells that occupy a specific niche in the body through a process involving heavily regulated/controlled variation. That’s the only way to get a nested heirarchy. Control over the process of change.
When they believed Pluto was a planet, they found this supported the basic tenets of modern astronomy. When they found that Pluto was not actually a planet but a dwarf planet or possibly even a collection of gazillions of comets, they found that this still supported the basic tenets of modern astronomy! This shows a disturbing difficulty to actually falsify the basic tenets of modern astronomy in any way.
Said no one ever.
(P.S. Yes, I know that vestigial organs play a somewhat larger role in the historical development of evolutionary theory than that of Pluto in modern astronomy. My points still hold that [1] the argument from vestigial organs is just one very small piece of an enormously complex network of evidence that all supports common descent with modification / evolution, and [2] disproving one example (one vestigial organ) does not disprove the entire element of the theory (all vestigial organs).)
It isn’t a classification issue.
Vestigial used to denote an organ that lost its function as a lineage progressed. Darwin used to use it as an argument against design.
Thus, if we saw, an organ without a function down the line in a tree, and it had a function when we go back in time, it is vestigial. (This makes sense to me).
Later when function started being identified for vestigial organs, the definition was changed to include organs that lost its initial function and gained a new one.
By this definition, everything that evolved a new function is vestigial.
For example, the forelimbs of four legged animals are supposed to have evolved into fore arms in primates and the function changed from helping in walking/running to helping in climbing/ handling tools in the case of humans…
By the new classification, arms should be vestigial. And pretty much anything that evolved a new form/function becomes vestigial.
This makes the application of this classification whimsical.
The appendix is vestigial… fore arms or wings are not.
Leading to tautologies… And unfalsifiability.
It’s dissatisfactory.
Honestly, I would actually be interested to hear others’ (e.g., @T_Aquaticus’s) responses to Ashwin’s final comments on vestigial organs before I reprise this argument for you. Why is an arm not a vestigial fin, etc.? His particular argument about the human appendix seemed to me to be a paltry classification issue, like Pluto’s planetary status, not capable of falsifying anything at a broader scale — but as he widened his comments to include the definition of vestigial limbs in general, I thought, well, this deserves a response from someone more qualified than I. Vestigial organs are just one small support among the many, many converging streams of evidence for common descent with modification; nevertheless, to the extent that vestigial organs remain a convincing support for evolutionary theory in the popular mind, if the meaning of the term has become so vague as to be synonymous with “exaptation,” why don’t we just talk about exaptation?
The paper does suggest that the widespread presence of the appendix in multiple species is indicative of common descent from an ancestor who had one, though its usefullness waxed and waned
Approx 32 times…
Anyway, I was just pointing out that it’s a little ridiculous to continue calling the appendix vestigial …
Even if you accept it’s not vestigial, I am not going to point to that piece of fact and say evolution didn’t happen…
Edit: waxed and waned is not the word… appeared and disappeared… no evidence of slowly becoming useless and disappearing.
I don’t believe anyone gets anywhere disputing Vestigial anything. Too much room for problems with terminology and so forth.
Letting vestigial topics dominate the discussion is like letting the Koch Brothers dominate a conversation on Global Warming by discussing how clean their coal is.
The topics (whether it be clean coal, or vestigial organs, or % Chimp DNA - - though endless interesting - - are not low-hanging fruit in regards to the main issue of defending and educating Evolutionary principles.
In a paper referenced by the paper @Ashwin_s linked above it does indicate that the appendix has appeared 38 times and been lost 6 times. An interesting paper by the way.
The Cecal Appendix: One More Immune Component With a Function Disturbed By Post‐Industrial Culture
So even if Darwin got it wrong in general (he was only aware of the appendix in humans) it still supports evolution as the appendix appears as needed.
Yes @Ashwin_s I know you will argue that this just means evolution is not falsifiable. I prefer to think that the theory of evolution is robust enough to account for new data.