Embyology
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.