Vestigial Organs 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 t ~ William A. Dembski

Richard had long ago made it clear that he viewed medical students as nothing more than an annoyance. Part canker, part pustule, we functioned – were he ever so generous to use that word – as vestigial organs, adding to the team like supernumerary nipples. ~ David Z. Hirsch

The pimp is the executive organ of immorality. The executive organ of morality is the blackmailer. ~ Karl Kraus

The hand is the prehensile organ of the mind. ~ Maria Montessori

'Meat' is a vague term and can be used to refer to many parts of an animal, including internal organs and skin. For the most part, the meat we eat consists of muscle tissue taken from farm animals, whether it's a sirloin steak, which is cut from the rear of a cow, or a pork chop, taken from flesh near the spine of a pig. ~ Michael Specter

And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher. ~ Charles Bukowski

I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a former organ harvester describe a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. ~ Carly Fiorina

The asana practice is extremely powerful and unique in design. In addition to improved flexibility, circulation, muscular strength and increased energy, and detoxification of the organs, each pose unblocks life force energy (prana) pathways in your body, reprograms your cellular DNA and connects us to our spiritual origin. ~ Dashama Konah Gordon

Some people take pleasure in regaling one and all with details of their poor health. They are happy to give an organ recital to anyone who will listen. ~ Ann Landers

Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs. ~ Pascale Petit

This thing isn't "natural" to us, you know? Some of the worst excesses against men were never - in my opinion anyway - perpetrated against women in the time before the Cataclysm. Three or four thousand years ago, it was considered normal to cull nine in ten boy babies. Fuck, there are still places today where boy babies are routinely aborted, or have their dicks "curbed." This can't have happened to women in the time before the Cataclysm. We talked about evolutionary psychology before - it would have made no evolutionary sense for cultures to abort female babies on a large scale or to fuck about with their reproductive organs! So it's not "natural" to us to live like this. It can't be. I can't believe it is. We can choose differently. ~ Naomi Alderman

There are few chemicals that we as a people are exposed to that have as many far reaching physiological affects on living beings as Monosodium Glutamate does. MSG directly causes obesity, diabetes, triggers epilepsy, destroys eye tissues, is genotoxic in many organs and is the probable cause of ADHD and Autism. Considering that MSG's only reported role in food is that of 'flavour enhancer' is that use worth the risk of the myriad of physical ailments associated with it? Does the public really want to be tricked into eating more food and faster by a food additive? ~ John E. Erb

What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simple ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable? ~ David Foster Wallace

An abusive culture, to me, is any culture that needs to single out and exclude a group. It's always a less productive culture because the organization's energy is diverted from lifting people up to keeping people down. It's like an autoimmune disease where the body sees its own organs as threats and begins attacking them. One of the most common signs of an abusive culture is the false hierarchy that puts women below men. ~ Melinda Gates

Diseased organs get the most attention. ~ Marty Rubin

…if I become an admitted pet owner, then I have to pay not only a several hundred dollar deposit to the apartment complex, but I'm pretty sure that they also reserve the right to harvest some of my bodily organs… ~ Wes Locher

Also, asceticism is all right when it is the proper means of attaining some special end. It is when it produces eructations of spiritual pride, and satisfied vanity, that it is poisonous. The Greek word means an athlete; and the training of an athlete is not mortification of the body. Nor is there any rule which covers all circumstances. When men go "stale" a few days before the race, they are "taken off training," and fed with champagne. But that is part of the training. Observe, too, that all men go "stale" sooner or later; training is abnormal, and must be stopped as soon as its object is attained. Even so, it too often strains vital organs, especially the heart and lungs, so that few rowing "Blues" live to be 50. But worst of all is the effect on the temper!

When it is permanent, and mistaken for a "Virtue," it poisons the very soil of the soul. The vilest weeds spring up; cruelty, narrowmindedness, arrogance - everything mean and horrible flowers in those who "Mortify the flesh." Incidentally, such ideas spawn the "Black Brother." The complete lack of humour, the egomaniac conceit, self-satisfaction, absence of all sympathy for others, the craving to pass their miseries on to more sensible people by persecuting them: these traits are symptomatic. ~ Aleister Crowley

The windblast sent people to the ground. A thunderhead of smoke and ash came moving toward them. The light drained dead away, bright day gone. They ran and fell and tried to get up, men with toweled heads, a woman blinded by debris, a woman calling someone's name. The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above.

He took one step and then the next, smoke blowing over him. He felt rubble underfoot and there was motion everywhere, people running, things flying past. He walked by the Easy Park sign, the Breakfast Special and Three Suits Cheap, and they went running past, losing shoes and money. He saw a woman with her hand in the air, like running to catch a bus.

He went past a line of fire trucks and they stood empty now, headlights flashing. He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That's where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name.

Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life. ~ Don DeLillo

Denis could think of no logical reason why he should not attempt to mate with Beth Cooper.
There were no laws explicitly against it.
They were of the same species, and had complementary sex organs, most likely, based on extensive mental modeling Denis had done. ~ Larry Doyle

He [the artist] ought to have 'these powerful organs of expression' - colour and chiaroscuro - entirely at his command, that he may use them in every possible form, as well as that he may do with the most perfect freedom; therefore, whether he wishes to make the subject of a joyous, solemn, or meditative character, by flinging over it the cheerful aspect which the sun bestows, by a proper disposition of shade, or by the appearances that beautify its arising or its setting, a true "General Effect" should never be lost sight of. ~ John Constable

The contradictory experiments of chemists leave us at liberty to conclude what we please. My conclusion is, that art has not yet invented sufficient aids to enable such subtle bodies [air, light, &c.] to make a well-defined impression on organs as blunt as ours; that it is laudable to encourage investigation but to hold back conclusion. ~ Thomas Jefferson

God wants a love partner, centering on the place where husband and wife become one through their sexual organs, God wants to appear and meet us ... I wish you would center on the absolute sexual organ, unique sexual organ, unchanging sexual organ and eternal sexual organ and use this as your foundation to pursue God ... We have to realize that the Kingdom of God on earth and in heaven will begin on this foundation. ~ Sun Myung Moon

You travel with a whetstone on your arm? (Kiara)
You don't ever want to kill someone with a dull knife. It takes too long to sever their arteries, or puncture organs, and it makes it even messier than normal. (Nykyrian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Impurities are constantly and imperceptibly passing from the body, through the pores, and if the surface of the skin is not kept in a healthy condition, the system is burdened with impure matter ... and if the garments worn are not frequently cleansed ... the pores of the skin absorb again the waste matter thrown off. The impurities of the body ... are taken back into the blood, and forced upon the internal organs. ~ Ellen G. White

I wanted to drag them all out, flay us all, destroy all the artificial separations of history. You'd merely done what I had, after all
split from two cells into four then eight then sixteen until you've accumulated all your arms and legs and organs and pushed yourself into the world
so fucking what? You honkey, nigger, spic, dyke, cunt. If I cry out, who will hear me? ~ Kelly J. Cogswell

The moment we crossed over the threshold, the moment when our veins and cells and organs went blip, I closed my eyes
And illusioned.
It wasn't like any illusion I'd created before. It flowed from me like a song, an orchestra of interweaving threads and melodies, painting themselves into a picture around us. [Everything] ... disappeared, and only Constantine, Queen Honoria and I stood in the nothing between two worlds. ~ Heather Dixon

Grant that men possess perpetual being and the preciousness of every earthly treasure is gone instantly. God is to our eternal being what our heart is to our body. The lungs, the liver, the kidneys have value as they relate to the heart. Let the heart stop and the rest of the organs promptly collapse. Apart from God, what is money, fame, education, civilization? Exactly nothing at all, for men must leave all these things behind them and one by one go to eternity. Let God hide His face and nothing thereafter is worth the effort. ~ A.W. Tozer

After Alex kills you, you can donate your fur to charity. And maybe some of your more viable organs. Im pretty sure everything but your liver is good. Ooooh, maybe they can use your micro-penis for a clitoris enlargement surgery. ~ Helena Hunting

If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom. I ~ Tim O'Brien

It is important to note that there are no age limitations on who can donate organs and tissue. Newborns as well as senior citizens have been organ donors. ~ Vic Snyder

(he thought it particularly foolish to endow inmates with a detailed sense of the positions of vital organs, but there you go), ~ V.E Schwab

HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it's like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude ... Also, they don't dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division. ~ Nicole Krauss

The cell was the first invention of the animal kingdom, and all higher animals are and must be cellular in structure. Our tissues were formed ages on ages ago; they have all persisted. Most of our organs are as old as worms. All these are very old, older than the mountains. ~ John M. Tyler