Due to teachers’ influence during the formative years of young people’s lives, they can be a powerful force in spreading evolution to new generations. Teachers carry real authority. They are implicitly trusted to teach truth and are stronger by virtue of knowledge their students don’t possess.

As a sophomore in high school biology, I knew nothing about my appendix. So when my trusted teacher told me that it was a vestigial organ, a useless leftover (i.e., a vestige) from my evolutionary ancestors, I believed it.¹ Why wouldn’t I? But I was fooled. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the appendix plays a major role in digestive system health.²

A scam is when one person abuses the virtue of trust to deceive another person who’s typically weaker in knowledge or experience and therefore vulnerable. People who’ve been scammed may also say that they’ve been duped, suckered, or tricked into allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. Vestigial organs are a large-scale scam used to dupe people into believing evolution. There’s no other word to describe it.

The best tool against being suckered by a scam is knowledge. Much literature refutes every evolutionary biologist’s alleged vestigial organ claim.³ Of more use, though, is the ability to recognize the pattern of how the vestigial organ scam is carried out.

As an illustration of this pattern, my biology teacher back in 1975 showed pictures of chimpanzees walking. I was told my arm-swinging-while-walking trait was an evolutionary leftover from the arm movements of my ape ancestors. I wasn’t alone in hearing this. A report on research in 2009 shows that the vestigial arm-swinging story has been repeated for decades. It said, “It has long been argued that the way we move our arms when walking is a vestige of our ancestral life on all fours.”⁴

We can now begin to recognize the key steps of evolutionary biologists’ vestigial organs scam.

1. Identify an obscure body part or action that most people have essentially no knowledge of (e.g., appendix, tailbone, adenoids, thymus and pineal glands, arrector pili muscles causing goosebumps, plica semilunaris or “third eyelid,” etc.).
2. Compound the ambiguity by selecting a characteristic, like human arm swinging, where the function isn’t immediately intuitive as it is, for example, with an eye, a heart, or breathing.
3. Maintain obscurity by skipping over any experiments to rule out potential functions.
4. Declare that the part is a vestigial remnant of past evolution—since no one knows of a useful function.
5. Ask inexperienced people, “If organisms were designed, why would God put a useless ____ in them? Aren’t ____ better explained by descent with modification?”
6. Play that note for decades until serious, experiment-oriented scientists test the evolutionary biologist’s story and discover a useful function (or even more utility) that shows how nonsensical the story is.
7. Ignore those research findings until accumulating press coverage forces a quiet abandonment of that particular vestigial-feature story. Then claim that evolutionary biologists knew all along that it likely had some function.

Image credit: desertrosestudios | BigStock

Back to the arm swinging. Biomechanics experts tested the metabolic efficiency of human arm swinging and discovered that not swinging used 12% more energy, and walking with opposite-to-normal arm phasing caused the metabolic rate to increase by 26%.⁵ The 2009 study concluded, “Rather than a facultative relic of the locomotion needs of our quadrupedal ancestors, arm swinging is an integral part of the energy economy of human gait.”⁵ Steven Collins, study coauthor and a biomechanical engineer (not an evolutionary biologist) at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, said, “This puts to rest the theory that arm swinging is a vestigial relic from our quadrupedal ancestors.”⁶

Vestigial features are not a real thing; rather, they are a concept that exists only in the mind of the beholder. It’s an empty argument from ignorance that, surprisingly, isn’t made by benchsitting evolutionary biologists but by their first-string players who keep the scam going.

But now you have the tools to recognize these scams. Try putting this critical vestigial-feature analysis to practice. Professor Jerry Coyne teaches,

Image credit: Herraez | BigStock

Whales are treasure troves of vestigial organs. Many living species have a vestigial pelvis and leg bones…[from] their descent from four-legged ancestors…they’re not connected to the rest of the bones, but are simply imbedded in tissue. They once were part of the skeleton, but became disconnected and tiny when they were no longer needed.”⁷

How many elements of a scam can you identify in Coyne’s claim?⁸ You should now feel equipped and hopefully empowered with the knowledge to identify the essential elements of the vestigial organ scam and bust this myth for others.

References

1. According to evolutionists, a vestigial structure is a part remaining in organisms whose function is diminished or totally lost from the part’s original function in the ancestors of that organism.
2. Guliuzza, R. J. 2016. Our Useful Appendix—Evidence of Design, Not Evolution. Acts & Facts. 45 (2): 12–14.
3. Bergman, J. 2019. Useless Organs: The Rise and Fall of a Central Claim of Evolution. Tulsa, OK: Bartlett Publishing; Guliuzza, R. J. 2016. The “Poor Design” of Our Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve. Acts & Facts. 45 (4): 17–19; Guliuzza, R. J. 2017. Evolutionists Strike Out with Imaginary Junk DNA, Part 1. Acts & Facts. 46 (4): 16–19.
4. Sample, I. Out on a Limb: Science Unveils Secrets of Swing. The Guardian. Posted on guardian. co.uk July 29, 2009, accessed July 30, 2009.
5. Collins, S. H., P. G. Adamczyk, and A. D. Kuo. 2009. Dynamic Arm Swinging in Human Walking. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 276 (1673): 3679–3688.
6. Connor, S. Mystery Solved—By Ministry of Silly Walks. Independent. Posted on independent. co.uk July 29, 2009.
7. Coyne, J. A. 2009. Why Evolution Is True. New York: Viking, 60.
8. Guliuzza, R. J. 2016. Are Whales and Evolution Joined at the Hip? Acts & Facts. 45 (3): 12–14.7–1789.

Stage image credit: GlobalP | iStock. Used in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holder.

Dr. Guliuzza is the president of the Institute for Creation Research. He earned his doctor of medicine from the University of Minnesota, his master of public health from Harvard University, and received an honorary doctor of divinity from Southern California Seminary. He served in the U.S. Air Force as 28th Bomb Wing flight surgeon and chief of aerospace medicine. Dr. Guliuzza is also a registered professional engineer and holds a B.A. in theology from Moody Bible Institute.