#vestigiality

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Intelligent design” isn’t, and your god is vestigial.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Practical demonstrations you can pop out any time.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The evolution of whales.

[kommabortsig]

Darwin-s-tubercle

[chochote-sijali]

I have just read that there’s a theory going around that hiccups are a vestigial trait from humans common ancestors with today’s amphibians.

Tell me why I’m faking hiccups right now and just now realizing how much they sound like ribbits…

[thingsidrawgohere]

New Learnt: Vestigiality

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[quantumaniac]

Vestigiality and Evolution 

Google Chrome, enough with the red line - vestigiality is a word, trust me on this one. Hearing people that say "whales have leg bones" or "dude, the appendix has no purpose" is pretty common nowadays - but people rarely know what this phenomenon is, or the implications of it. 

What our good friends are thinking of is a phenomenon called vestigiality, which refers to genetically determined structures or attributes that have apparently lost most or all of their ancestral function in a given species. Therefore, throughout normal evolutionary processes, features and structures that once had a clearly defined purpose start to lose importance in a changing environment. 

Many people use the phrase vestigial organs, when in fact vestigiality extends to include patterns of behavior, structures, or biochemical processes. Despite common belief, a vestigial feature need not be complete useless - it just simply serves a difference function than it would have in ancestral times. A classic example is the human appendix - though vestigial in the sense of retaining no significant digestive function, it still plays immunological roles.

Vestigiality need not even be macroscopic, as similar concepts apply at the molecular level — some nucleic acid sequences in eukaryotic genomes have no known biological function. Although some of them may be "junk DNA", it is very tricky to demonstrate that a particular sequence of a given genome is truly nonfunctional. As stated with macroscopic features, the fact that it is noncoding DNA does not mean that it is functionless - just that the sequence has lost its formal former function. 

It is fairly easy to confuse the concept of vestigiality with that of a similar phenomenon - exaptation. In exaptation a structure originally used for one purpose is modified for a new one. For example, the wings of penguins would be exaptational in the sense of serving a substantial new purpose (underwater locomotion), but might still be regarded as vestigial in the sense of having lost the function of flight. 

In Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, he listed a number of human "vestiges," including the muscles of the ear, wisdom teeth, the appendix, the tail bone, body hair, and the semilunar fold in the corner of the eye. Interestingly, the formation of goose bumps in humans under stress is a vestigial reflex; its function in human ancestors was to raise the body's hair, making the ancestor appear larger and scaring off predators. These vestigial organs, Darwin argued, are evidence of evolution and represent a function that was once necessary for survival, but over time that function became either diminished or nonexistent. 

[sammiesmind]

Vestigiality

Vestigiality

Human body contains some interesting phenomena, organs and behaviours that are remnants of something that used to be useful but lost it's function somewhere along the evolution and are now even annoying in some cases. Such vestigial characters are, for instance, the third eyelid, wisdom teeth, goose bumps, appendix, and a few other.

Some are still degenerating, some were replaced by other functions that still get the same result, some are gaining new functions. But all in all, they're a good example of how evolution works. With gaining muscles that allow us to move our heads, the muscles previously appointed for moving ears to the source of the sound stiffened; the apparent dead end of the intestine - the appendix - while not digesting cellulose any more, may well be harbouring a reserve of intestinal bacteria to help repopulate the colon in case of emergency.

But what if vestigial occurrence doesn't happen only in physiology, biology and nature, what if it can happen in society? How is or would that be then represented?

Would a vestigial person be someone who can't find his or her purpose in life and the proper role in the society? Who maybe had no problem with existing while being a child, like embryos having a proper tail which then degrades into the tailbone, but has, in adulthood, found himself or herself redundant as an individual.

And what can such person do about that? Can he or she gain a function useful to the rest of humanity or is him or her destined for being an outcast, someone always in other people's ways, slowing down the evolution of the society?

Wouldn't then be easier for all involved to just "surgically remove" the vestigial person, like an aching wisdom tooth?