VESTIGIAL ORGANS 



lutionary change certain organs might naturally lose their 

 usefulness and be replaced by others of a more appropriate 

 type. As such organs gradually decay, so to speak, they 

 should be expected to appear in much the way that vestigial 

 organs do. Man possesses a system of functionless muscles 

 connected with his external ear because these muscles were 

 once useful to that organ in a pre-human ancestor who had 

 occasion to move his ears as some modern animals still do. 

 Man has a hairy covering before birth in consequence of his 

 derivation from a stock of animals once fully covered with 

 hair. His vermiform appendix is the remnant of an organ 

 that was once a functional part of the digestive system of a 

 remote ancestor. 



Like other animals, man is not only a highly equipped and 

 efficient organism with a most marvelous system of parts 

 adapted to serve his bodily needs but he is also a repository 

 of some of the most interesting and important relics of the 

 past, relics whose significance can be truly understood only if 

 they are viewed from the standpoint of the evolutionist. 

 These relics are vestigial organs, and it is in this way and in 

 this way only that such organs can be understood. 



Organic evolution is not a principle that is open to direct 

 and simple proof. Like the movement of the earth around 

 the sun it can be demonstrated only indirectly. We do not 

 even know that the earth is round by direct inspection. The 

 shadow cast by the earth on the moon in an eclipse, the 

 appearance of the ship as it rises over the horizon, and a 

 number of other occurrences in nature are best explained on 

 the assumption that the earth is round. The Copernican 

 theory explains astronomic phenomena, it accounts ade- 

 quately for all happenings in the skies. In a similar way 

 organic nature, plants as well as animals, is full of happen- 

 ings that call for some general explanation, and no principle 



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