I've already gone so frikkin far into how stupid it is to call any part of the human body worthless in the evolution topic. You can't say anything is useless. Just because we don't know what the use is, doesn't mean it has no use. Many organs once thought useless have been found to be quite useful even in very recent years, but I'll go ahead and humor you for a moment.
#1 - VOMERONASAL ORGAN
There isn't even a general agreement among biologists that humans have vomeronasal pits at all. Some people (most people, actually, I believe) don't have the pits at all, and as for the ones that do, not only is there no agreement as to whether or not they are vomeronasal organs at all, but there is, in fact, no agreement as to whether or not they are functional!
But what does the extremely small amount of data concerning this organ say? I mean, it's great that Jocelyn Selim says it's useless and nonfunctioning, but I have this sinking suspicion that Jocelyn Selim doesn't know what the hell she is talking about, even if she is a pretty frikkin smart author otherwise. An article in the
Ear, Nose & Throat Journal in August of 2000 detailed a thorough study of the prevalence of the organ, thought to be the most methodoligically sound study of its time, determined prevalence to be around 30-50%. Some people have 1 pit, some others have 2, while the rest have non at all. An article in Molecular Biology concluded that, in people who have the organ, they are in fact functional chemoreceptors.
#2 - EXTRINSIC EAR MUSCLES
Wiggle your ears for me. Wiggle them for a good long while. Wiggle them until your useless extrinsic ear muscles are good and tired. Seriously, do it for like 2 minutes, get a good rythme goin. Now, make a big old toothy smile. Watch your favorite comedy, and get a good laugh on. Can you wiggle your ears when you have a big smile on your face? You probably shouldn't because those muscles are also used in smiling. They are also used to change the shape of your ear canal, and when stretch correctly, can slightly improve your hearing (ever strain to hear something?). They are called the Auriculares muscles, and aside from being far from useless, you pretty much need them for a lot of things.
#3 - WISDOM TEETH
How do you figure that teeth that are, in most of the people who have them, still functional and capable of carrying out their duty of chewing food, are worthless leftovers? But, this isn't really the important part, because the whole concept of even mentioning Wisdom Teeth doesn't take into account a couple of important things. For starters, the condition of our jaws could be the result of many things, environmental factors included. We don't have to chew as much to get the most out of our food as we did before, yes, but have you considered that that could have shaped the development of our jaw? Have you considered this at all, Mujklob? Have you factored into your research that, maybe - just maybe - nutrition could have
something to do with the way our bones develop, as opposed to the way they did long ago? The Price-Pottinger foundation (nutritional scientists) did a study of several other cultures whose diets are considered to be closer to the "intended" staple diets of humans (more raw foods, no twinkies), and found something interesting. These people's teeth didn't usually get compacted or need braces. They didn't get cavities. It's also fairly well know as well that the amount of time a baby spends breastfeeding has a lot to do with the development of their teeth and jaws.
Now, until someone can demonstrate to me that environmental factors on a person's life have no effect on the state of their wisdom teeth, that's enough for me. But it's important to also note that creationism allows quite easily for genetic breakdown, and in fact argue just that - humans are breaking down. So, even if wisdom teeth were useless, which they clearly aren't, and the result of genetic variation over time, which is also probably not the case, it says nothing in opposition to the creationist view.
Loss of a useful part of our body for no good reason is a problem with the current model of evolution. If you want to say that disuse of the wisdom teeth caused them to diminish, you are agreeing with the now known to be false assumption by Darwin that aquired features could be inherited. We've come a lot futher than that, I had thought.
This concept holds value on many of these so-called "useless organs." The only explanation scientists can give in most of these cases as to why the organ diminished is that we didn't use them anymore. Do scientists even study science anymore? If I tape off my legs and don't use them anymore, my kids won't inherit that. If every generation after me never used their legs, nowhere along the line would this result into the de-evolution of legs in my bloodline. It's called Lamarckian Evolution, and it's been proven false by secular scientists.
Finally, I don't know if I made this clear, but some people's wisdom teeth are perfectly fine and functional! Did they miss the evolutionary train?
#4 - NECK RIB
This is the first only only time I've ever seen a congenital birth defect in fewer than .5% of the population called offered as an argument against creationism. I'm not even going to go into this one. What will they use next, the structures present on blood cells in people with sickle cell anemia? I can hear it now, "Ancient dinosaur birds used their sickle cell blood bullets to capture their prey, a new report by famed alcoholic arcaeologist claims." O
#5 THIRD EYELID
The Plica Luminaris, or Nictitating Membrane, is a subject that I can't find any scholarly information in in reference to humans, and as such I can't really say. It may just be there to make the seal around our eye better, if I was pressed to guess.
I don't feel like researching this topic anymore, because need to wake up in 5 and a half hours. However, in my searching for articles on "Darwin's Point" I found this nifty article, that does a lot of my work for me:
http://www.trueauthority.com/cvse/discover.htm
Even if you don't read it, I hope you care to think a little more independantly on this subject. I know people classify me as a mindless drone who takes whatever he's told just because I'm a christian, but I try to think for myself, and I do my own research.
