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Non-Darwinian Wordle

 
 
 
I once collected a big list of vestigial features.

Vertebrates:
  • The wings of flightless birds - with the structure of flying birds' wings
  • Expressible bird-tooth genes
  • Most mammal tails - from their being much reduced compared to most other vertebrates' tails
  • Connection to having a brachiating ancestor? - ape, human taillessness
  • Stumpy tails in domestic animals bred to have no tails
  • Embryonic tails of tailless animals
  • Mammalian male nipples
  • Tadpoles - larvae of frogs that are much like fish
  • Gill bars in the embryos of amniotes (reptiles, birds, mammals)
  • Jaw origin from gill bars
  • Small, almost-lost toes - dog dewclaws, ...
  • Fused bones - bones that start out separate
  • Giraffe necks - they start out short, then grow long. They seven neck vertebrae like most other mammals: seven long ones
  • Solid-color equines (horses and donkeys) having offspring with zebra stripes
  • Fetal teeth missing from adults - cows, baleen whales
  • Snakes with rudimentary limbs
  • Snakes with one lung small
  • Cetacean hipbones
  • Eyes moving from the sides of the head (their usual position) to the front (in some species)
  • Flounders having one eye that moves to join the other eye on its side
  • Wisdom teeth - teeth that we are in the middle of losing
  • Outsized hind legs of some four-legged dinosaurs - the earliest ones were two-legged, and many later ones reverted to going on all fours
  • The Hoatzin chick's wing claws - bird wings are front limbs
  • Hollowness of dodo and penguin bones - not needed by flightless birds
  • The mammalian amniotic sac
  • Aquatic-tetrapod air breathing and breeding on land
  • Lesbian lizards - parthenogenetic lizards that reproduce by one of them being a "pseudomale" and biting the other one in the neck to make that one lay eggs
  • Testicles descending into a scrotum from inside the abdominal wall
 
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Invertebrates
  • Homeotic (one part like another) mutations in insects
    • Legs instead of antennae of fruit flies
    • Legs instead of mouthparts of fruit flies and mosquitoes
    • Wings instead of halteres of fruit flies
  • Small wings of the flightless females of some moth species
  • Crab tails - short and tucked under their bodies
  • Torting (twisting) of gastropods (snails, etc.) as they grow - some of them later de-tort themselves
Plants
  • Flowers of self-pollinators
  • Flower parts are modified leaves
  • Vestigial flower parts of non-flowering angiosperms, like grasses
  • Nonfunctional pistils in male flowers
  • Alternation of generations in seed plants: the haploid phase is only a few cells
  • Leaves of parasitic plants
Cells and one-celled organisms
  • Pseudogenes (broken genes) from gene duplications
  • Polyploidy - genome duplications
  • Mitochondria and plastids as former alpha-proteobacteria and cyanobacteria
  • Hydrogenosomes: broken mitochondria
  • Oxygen use as an add-on
  • The RNA world: bits of RNA in enzyme cofactors and the like
 
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