Are whale pelvic bones evolutionary remnants?

Whales belong to the cetacean group of marine mammals, which also includes dolphins. Their pelvic bones are notably small relative to their overall body size.

For a long time, scientists believed that whale pelvic bones are so small because they are vestigial—a shrunken evolutionary remnant from an ancestor that once walked on land. However, new research from the University of Southern California (USC) and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) directly challenges the idea that whale pelvic bones are useless leftovers with no real function. The study, conducted by James P. Dines, Erik Otárola-Castillo, Peter Ralph, Jesse Alas, Timothy Daley, Andrew D. Smith, and Matthew D. Dean, found that these tiny bones actually serve a specific and important purpose: they play a major role in reproduction, especially in the mating process of whales and dolphins. The research was published in a 2014 paper in Evolution.¹ The muscles that control the penis of a cetacean—a term that refers to all 90 species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises—attach directly to its pelvic bones. These muscles allow for a high degree of mobility, and the pelvic bones give whales greater maneuverability during the challenging task of mating in the water. Jim Dines, collections manager of Mammalogy at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, stated: “Contrary to popular belief, these are not vestigial structures. They do have a function. That function is reproduction.”² Matthew Dean, assistant professor at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said: “everyone’s always assumed that if you gave whales and dolphins a few more million years of evolution, the pelvic bones would disappear. But it appears that’s not the case.”³ Erik Otárola-Castillo, a fellow in David Pilbeam’s paleoanthropology lab in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, said: “The pelvic bones of whales are one of the classic examples of a vestigial structure. But what we found was that the shapes of these bones are highly associated with the mating systems of these whales and dolphins.”⁴ ScienceDaily reported that whales and dolphins need their hips (pelvic bones) for reproduction:⁵

To conclude, so-called vestigial organs offer no special support for the theory of evolution. The real challenge for evolutionists is not explaining the loss of useful organs, but accounting for the origin of new, functional organs with all their integrated complexity. It is in this area that evolutionary narratives arise. The Darwinist mindset often searches for flaws in biological systems as a way to argue against design. This dogmatic approach has led Darwinists to insist on the existence of imagined flaws and supposedly useless vestigial organs in living organisms. Yet time and again, such claims have proven to be rooted in ignorance, as scientists have discovered that these organs do, in fact, serve important functions. Indeed, every human organ in living organisms is designed to fulfill a specific purpose, and all are the creation of the All-Wise God, who made everything in perfect measure. Allāh says: {˹That is˺ the design of Allāh, Who has perfected everything} (Qurʾān 27:88). Every single atom in the universe has a definite purpose. Indeed, the more we learn about nature, the clearer the evidence becomes for Allāh’s creation. The conclusion of intelligent design is based not on what we do not know, but on the discoveries of science—whereas Darwinism rests on an argument from ignorance, an atheism of the gaps. Given the history of the vestigial organs debate, it is unwise to label any organ as vestigial, for scientists’ lack of knowledge about a structure’s function does not mean it has none. Without a doubt, continued research will, as in the past, uncover specific functions for the remaining supposedly useless organs. In a word, the argument for vestigial organs is itself vestigial.