EMBRYOLOGY

Another area of study and research in which the creation perspective

would have sped up the advance of science is embryology. If we start

with the basic idea that an intelligent Designer created with pan and

purpose, then we are motivated to look for these purposes in the things

that we see, even in the embryonic stages of life. We do not stop our

investigation when we see something that resembles the structure of

another organism, and immediately conclude that it is just a throwback to

a presumed evolutionary ancestor.

This was done, for a time, by evolutionists, when the yolk sac and

so called gill slits of the human embryo were thought to be

recapitulations of bird and fish ancestors. More investigation has shown

that the yolk sac actually reproduces the essential first blood cells for

the new individual-an activity that is functionally quite different from

the bird egg yolk.

The gill slits, which were neither gills nor slits,

have been more appropriately renamed pharyngeal pouches, which in humans

develop into eustachian tubes, the thymus, and parathyroid glands. As

scientists gave up on the recapitulation idea, it freed them to explore

every area of embryonic development and to look for specific plan,

purpose, and interdependence. Many specific distinctions have been

discovered since then.

Making similar false assumptions from the evolutionary viewpoint, while

looking at fully developed organisms, led evolutionists to the whole

concept of vestigial organs.

This view proposed that certain organs in

man, as well as in various animals, are useless vestiges of structures

that were useful in a former evolutionary stage. There were certainly

some negative results from this kind of thinking. How many of us in

past decades had our tonsils surgically removed the first time we had a

sore throat? Such an operation was a reasonable thing to do, if the

tonsils were just a leftover, useless organ from our evolutionary past.

How much ore cautious we have become about removing the tonsils, that we

know they play a role in protecting the body from disease..

Had we taken

a creationist perspective at first, maybe we would have realized that

any organ designed into the human system had a plan and purpose,

and we would not have been so quick to remove the tonsils without very

significant cause. following evolutionary thinking caused us, at one

time, to have a list of over 180 vestigial organs in the human body,

which included such things as the thyroid gland, they thymus, and the

muscles of the ear, as well as many other organs that have useful and

often essential functions.