vestigial proof

How ludicrously they dangled up there — two little wires suspending them beneath the spine, about midway between ribs and tail. Grayish-white, cylindrical; small batons frozen in midair.

Leg bones. In a whale.

I remember gaping at the overhead skeleton as my fourth grade class filed through the Smithsonian. I wondered if whales even knew they had those bones. Could they feel them? I marveled at the vastness of time, the relentless march that expelled fish onto land and drew them back again as mammals.

It almost seemed too incredible — but there they were, leg remnants in a whale, plain as day. Two hundred million years could do anything. (They could even draw a whale out of a deer the size of a fox!)

Back in class we heard more examples of vestigiality. Evolution was sloppy: organs and behaviors important for survival at one point in time might not be later on, leaving behind some unused (or at least less-used) pieces. Ostrich wings. Cavefish eyes. The human appendix, coccyx. Junk DNA. It would take whales millions of years more to shed the last vestiges of their leg bones — unless, of course, they put them to some other use. (Wrapped in blubbery flesh as they were, away from other bone or even muscle, that was doubtful.)

I was a good little science student. I understood vestigial organs well.

Much later, in my mid-twenties, I thought through what I’d learned about evolution through public school and college, and came up with questions. The universe — scratch that, the human mind was extraordinarily complex; how could such order arise from unconscious forces? I flirted with the idea of function by design, which of course implied a Designer.

But there was that issue of vestigiality: organs without function. Would a Designer give humans a tailbone, an appendix? Would a Designer write gobbledygook into DNA?

Then again, what if scientists were wrong?

Nah, scientists investigate everything. If the appendix served a function we’d know about it.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this article appeared in October 2007:

CNN: Purpose of appendix believed found

Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut.

That’s the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week.

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix’s job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix “acts as a good safe house for bacteria,” said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac — helps support the theory, he said.

Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating the good germs, Parker said.

Reading this, I thought immediately of junk DNA. “They’re going to figure it out,” I told my wife. “I need to blog about it, make my prediction public. Evolution’s supposed to be this great predictor, but it’s throwing them off. A Designer wouldn’t write junk code. It must serve some kind of purpose. Maybe it’s structural, it holds DNA together somehow; maybe it helps in replication. I don’t know. Whatever it is, I need to go on record!”

Four days later my second son was born, and in the ensuing crazyness of adjusting to two-child parenthood, I let that prediction languish in my to-blog list.

Too bad. Within three and a half months (January 2008) came this article:

Science Daily: Tiny genetic differences have huge consequences

A study led by McGill University researchers has demonstrated that small differences between individuals at the DNA level can lead to dramatic differences in the way genes produce proteins. These, in turn, are responsible for the vast array of differences in physical characteristics between individuals.

This study solves in part the mystery of how a relatively small number of differences within DNA protein coding sequences could be responsible for the enormous variety of phenotypic differences between individuals. It had previously been shown that individual differences reside in simple, relatively small variations in the DNA sequence called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, often pronounced “snips”), which exist primarily in the “junk code” of the DNA not previously known to have any profound genetic effect.

“There are many SNPs,” explained Dr. Jacek Majewski of McGill University. “If you add them all together, you’d expect that two individuals would differ at more than a million of those positions. So we have a million or more small differences that distinguish you and me, and yet it would be very hard to explain all the phenotypic differences in the way we look, grow, and behave just by the handful of these protein coding differences.”

Majewski and his colleagues have demonstrated that the natural processing of messenger RNA (mRNA), via a process called splicing, is genetically controlled by these SNPs. The SNPs in certain individuals lead to changes in splicing and result in the production of drastically altered forms of the protein. These out-of-proportion consequences may lead to the development of genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Type 1 diabetes.

Junk DNA isn’t rubbish at all. Junk DNA shapes protein production, and that, in turn, shapes who you are.

Long touted as proof of evolution, vestigiality is beginning to collapse. And despite insistence on evolution’s predictive power, as a concept vestigiality tempts scientists to overlook possible function. “No use researching that,” they dismiss, “it has little function — it’s vestigial!” Such an attitude is no less responsible for thwarting scientific inquiry than the roundly-criticized creationist mantra “God did it.”

The appendix was vestigial until Duke researchers discovered its purpose. Junk DNA was vestigial until McGill researchers discovered its purpose.

More and more, the supposedly sloppy process of evolution is morphing into a tight economy of design. Function exists where it was once thought lacking, demonstrating that where vestigiality is concerned, intelligent design has more predictive power than evolution. We only need to look.

And there’s the rub: Darwinists who point at vestigiality as proof of evolution may not want to look.

But now is not the time to skimp on inquiry. No more easy outs: going forward, the concept of vestigiality should be treated as temporarily void so we can take a vigorous, open-minded look at organs and behaviors once considered obsolete. In all cases we must investigate function with the conviction that it will be found — and acknowledge the possibility of our own shortcomings if it is not.

We need to reopen cases long gone cold. Coccyx. Ostrich wings. Even cavefish eyes — which may indeed be vestigial (even creationists recognize variation and speciation of animal kinds since creation), but you never know until you look.

I missed going on record with my prediction about junk DNA. Fair enough; I get no credit for that one. But now I’ll make a new prediction, one even more radical.

Those little whale bones?

They serve a purpose.

That purpose will be found. But not by deductive Darwinism.

No, it’s going to take a little old-fashioned inductive science.