Vestigial Organs?

Basically, it's the wide-used creationist tactic of semantic shifting, which is changing the meaning of terminology. Its more common use is to quote a scientific source using scientific terminology and then reinterpreting it to their audiences by using the non-scientific street meanings. IOW, they lie about what their sources are saying.In this case, they present "vestigial" as meaning "having no function" whereas the more proper meaning is that it no longer has its original purpose.Now, why do creationists use semantic shifting? Obviously, because the evidence does not support their position, they need to make it look like it does. Are they doing it on purpose? Again obviously, most creationists have no idea what they're talking about, so they're regurgitating such nonsense while not having a clue. Even some, if not most, of the originators of such claims are also acting out of ignorance, there are some originators who are lying on purpose.How you to respond? Once you've learned enough to be able to carry on a discussion, then take their claims seriously and try to discuss them with the creationists presenting them. Especially try to get them to discuss the actual evidence. For example, Kent Hovind made a claim based on the rate at which the sun is losing mass while it "burns its fuel" (actually, though he would skirt that issue, the mass loss is due to the thermonuclear reaction in its core that converts hydrogen to helium and energy -- about 5 million tons lost per second) and extrapolating back 5 billion years to a sun so huge and massive that it would have sucked the earth in. So I did the math and found that the sun would have only been marginally more massive back then and would have only "sucked" the earth in by less than 100,000 miles. When I tried to discuss this claim with Hovind, he did everything he could to avoid it, even to the point of twice trying to pick a fight with me over my user name, DWise1.Nothing makes a creationist more angry than taking their claims seriously and trying to conduct a serious discussion of those claims. While in cases such as Hovind's they know that their claim is a lie and they're trying to keep from having that lie exposed, in most cases I'm certain that most creationists are simply too ignorant of their own claims to be able to discuss them.

I wasn't trying to define "vestigial organ". The point was the typical creationist tactic of imposing an unrealistic definition in order to artificially define inconvenient evidence out of existence.By defining "vestigial organ" as having to have no function, they then can define it away by showing that it does serve some function, even if that is not the original primary function.Sorry for having confused you with "new function". Such "new functions" were meant to be formerly secondary functions becoming primary. Eg, the pelvises of snakes and of whales no longer serve as attachments for their hind legs that they no longer have (not counting the occasional whale born with rudimentary leg stubs), however muscles and bone do still attach to them, so that has become their "new" function. Of course, back when their ancestors still had hind legs, their pelvis did also serve to attach to their spine and to provide attachment points for muscles, tendons, and ligaments.Sorry for having caused any confusion. I had assumed that it should be obvious.

I have seen similar accounts mentioned of hens' teeth. Take gum tissue from a mouse embryo and apply it to the jaw of a chick embryo, and you get hens' teeth -- tooth buds form in the chick jaw.Admittedly not my area of expertise (which happens to be C and digital electronics), but my understanding of embroyic development (which is what you're talking about) includes tissue activating particular genes based on bio-chemical signals from its neighboring tissue -- eg, all cells in the embryo contain the genes for producing teeth, but only the jaw tissue adjacent to gum tissue will actually express those genes, whereas the tissue about the knee does not (much more salacious alternative sites for teeth could be imagined, depending on the degree of mysogyny one suffers from).Embryonic development is where the rubber meets the road. Whatever mutations occur, the only ones that are of any possible importance to evolution are the ones happen in the germ cells (AKA sperm and ova). Mutations to body cells are meaningless (albeit potentially extremely meaningful to that individual, particularly if that mutation results in cancer), because they cannot be inherited. Also, mutations caused by adnormal conditions during development are also meaningless -- these are what creationists commonly refer to as "mutations are always deleterious" -- , unless they also cause changes in the DNA of the germ cells, since such mutations (barring any changes to germ cell DNA) only affect that individual and not its offspring. Only changes in the DNA of germ cells can possibly have any evolutionary meaning.And -- despite how fast-and-loose Star Trek:TNG+ would play with DNA -- , most of those changes in germ-cell DNA should only make themselves apparent during embryonic development. I feel that understanding what goes on during embryonic development is an essential part of understanding how evolution had happened in the past. Comparing the protein sequences of different species is only the beginning.