The Appendix: Darwin's Little Mistake
“The body’s appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact,” says Charles Q. Choi, a writer for LiveScience.Com, “good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation.” Apparently, all of that has changed. Choi goes on to say, “Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant.”
Most of us know someone who has had his appendix removed and lived to tell about it. In fact, slightly more than 1 in 20 people, says Choi, have the simple procedure and experience no negative side effects. The common medical notion is that we really don’t need our appendix. It’s a useless organ.
The idea about the good-for-nothing organ first came from Charles Darwin. Yes, Darwin! The man so many people trust for an accurate understanding of the origin of life. Darwin believed the appendix was a vestige of evolution. He theorized that the tiny organ was once part of a larger structure called a cecum that was used for digesting food in an extinct ancestor that ate leaves.
Now researchers believe the appendix is a “safe house” for good bacteria that could be used after a bad case of diarrhea. Other studies suggest that the appendix might play a role in the creation of important white blood cells.
According to Choi, William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., believes “it’s time to correct the textbooks.”
We need to correct Darwin? Exactly, but evolutionists like Parker are not conceding as much ground as you might think. He is quick to silence any Darwin criticizers with, “We’re not saying that Darwin’s idea of evolution is wrong – that would be absurd, as we’re using his ideas on evolution to do this work. It’s just that Darwin simply didn’t have the information we have now.”
Dare I? If Darwin can’t get it right about something as small and seemingly insignificant as the appendix, why should we trust him about the origin of life itself? What other bits of information will we learn (have we learned) some time later that prove Darwin was wrong?
Parker uses phrases like “if Darwin had been aware” and “he probably would not have thought” to back peddle his way into restoring confidence in Darwin’s faulty theories. Christians, on the other hand, submit to the following criteria: The Bible must be right 100 percent of the time or it cannot be trusted. That’s because the credibility of the Holy Scriptures rises and falls on God’s ability to speak the truth, beginning with the first verse of the Bible (Gen. 1:1).
This new discovery about the body’s appendix raises important questions. What or who should we trust about the origin of life? Where’s our starting point? Should science really be given the trump card when it comes to the big issues of life, even though its theories, axioms and postulates are subject to change with new information? For centuries people have tried to destroy the Bible and the creation story, and yet, having stood the test of time, it remains the best-selling book ever. How many science textbooks have been corrected in the past two thousand years?
If Darwin were alive today, he would at least need to write an appendix (pun intended) to his book The Origin of Species, correcting this and other mistakes he made about the origin of life.
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