The standard definition of ‘vestigial’ is an organ that once was
useful in an animal’s evolutionary past, but that now is useless
or very close to useless. The list of vestigial organs in humans
has shrunk from 180 in 1890 to 0 in 1999. Evidently to salvage
this once-critical support for evolution, a new revisionistic
definition of a vestigial structure is now sometimes used. This
definition involves the idea that a vestigial organ is any part
of an organism that has diminished in size during its evolution
because the function it served decreased in importance or became
totally unnecessary. This definition is problematic because it
is vague and would allow almost every structure in humans to be
labelled as vestigial. The question, ‘Do any vestigial organs
exist in humans?’ (or any other life form for that matter),
first requires a definition of ‘vestigial’. The most common
definition of a vestigial organ throughout the last century was
similar to the following: ‘Living creatures, including man, are
virtual mu