CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



and as it is ordinarily lost before birth it must be regarded 

 as a vestigial organ, purely embryonic in its history. Its 

 occasional retention after birth gives rise to the hairy men 

 and women of the museums and the side-shows. 



Man, both in his embryonic and his adult state, possesses 

 an abundance of vestigial organs. In fact, students of this 

 subject who have tabulated these parts have attributed to 

 the human being almost a hundred such organs, and though 

 some of these may on further investigation prove not to be 

 true examples of vestigial parts, most of them certainly fall 

 into this class, so that man may be said to be rich in organs 

 of this kind. 



The brief survey that has just been made shows that ves- 

 tigial organs are widely distributed throughout the animal 

 kingdom, and that they may be abundantly present in a 

 given species, such as man. Their evolutionary significance 

 has long been a matter of comment. If animals were spe- 

 cially created why should there be included in their bodies 

 parts that are quite useless and often in fact positively detri- 

 mental to them? Why, for instance, should man possess a 

 system of functionless muscles for his external ear, a useless 

 hairy covering before birth, and a worse than useless vermi- 

 form appendix? No advocate of the theory of special crea- 

 tion has ever been able to give a satisfactory answer to these 

 questions. To those who believe in special creation the pres- 

 ence of vestigial organs has proved a stumbling block that 

 they have never been able to avoid. In fact, the occurrence 

 of organs of this type has always been an insuperable obstacle 

 to the acceptance of this view of the production of organic 

 species. 



From an evolutionist's standpoint, on the other hand, ves- 

 tigial organs are precisely what should be expected. They 

 are organs in process of disappearance. In the course of evo- 



£46] 



