Darwinians ever since Darwin have pointed to structures like the human appendix to demonstrate that our bodies were once different from what they are today. The tailbone is a vestige of the tail that humans once possessed, we're told. Hip bones in whales are vestiges of legs possessed by the whale's ancestors which walked on land. And the appendix too, was believed to be a functionless appendage left over from some previous stage in our evolution.
Over time functions were found for many of these "vestigial structures" and they were quietly dropped from the textbooks. Now it looks like it has been shown that the appendix, too, has a function in the body, and must be added to the ranks of former vestiges which are no longer vestigial.
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems that every new scientific discovery that bears somehow upon the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinian materialism either supports the ID position or counts against the materialist position. It's hard to think of any discovery of the last twenty years or so that actually supports the materialists.
But I might be uninformed. If anyone can think of a counter-example please pass it along.
RLC
