Vestigial Structures Quotes

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already. But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.

The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very definitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female. ” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial, useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by men.

What about the computer? Does it think, and if so does that make it conscious? For the present at least, the answer is that it does not think in the sense that human beings and other mammals think and so is not conscious in the same sense. Furthermore, the mammalian brain is enormously more complex than any present computer, not only in the number of functional elements but also in its connections, the individual neuron frequently having synaptic connection with upwards of a thousand others. What I propose is that we have here a parallel with the physicist’s concept of a critical mass. Consciousness, that is, depends on a critical degree of complexity of neural action. Probably also it requires the kind or pattern of complexity characteristic of the structure of mammalian cortex. The individual neuron then is not conscious, nor any small group of interacting neurons. Consciousness appeared in evolution when thought became possible, and there is no evidence of thought in lower animals, even those with quite extensive nervous systems. It probably exists in birds such as the crow, but it has not actually been demonstrated except in mammals. In them the cortex is well developed, but vestigial or absent in other animal forms. The argument then is that a computer built on the plan of the mammalian brain, and of a complexity at least equal to that of the brain of the laboratory rat, might be conscious—given the same capacity to learn and a suitable early experience. This is unlikely, but conceivable.