Archive: Horses’ “Vestigial Muscles” Are Really Dampers
This reprint from December 2001 is
sure to be a hit with horseback riders!
Note: Some embedded links may no longer work.
Horses’ “Vestigial Muscles” Are Really Dampers 12/20/2001
Horses and camels have tiny muscles in their legs, as short as 6mm, attached to very long tendons (almost as long as the leg itself). Evolutionists have thought these muscles must be vestigial; i.e., useless leftovers from earlier ancestors. But now, writing in Nature 12/20/01, Alan M. Wilson and colleagues think there’s a reason for these unusual muscles. Modeling the forces and tensions and vibrations involved in galloping, the researchers demonstrate that the muscles serve as dampers, to reduce damage to bones and tissues from vibrations caused by the foot striking the ground.
Author galloping on horse, 1973
A layman’s summary of the paper was added December 21 on Nature Science Update and is well worth reading. It explains that tendons are like elastic springs, giving the horses’s legs the bounce of a pogo stick. But the 93% recoil of the tendons causes a problem: “Spring heels are all very well, but they could shake horses and other runners, such as camels, to bits.” The small muscles, being more “squashy,” act like rubber washers to damp out the otherwise damaging vibrations. “As it is, racehorses run at their limits. Fatigue damage is a leading cause of injury, and the spring system can fail in as little as 10,000 strides when galloping. Without the muscle fibres, this rate would be even worse.”
The summary also explains that “These fibres may be costly to develop and maintain but they are ideally suited to absorbing the shockwaves that accompany each stride. They are not mere evolutionary vestiges, as some had suspected.”
The argument for evolution based on vestigial organs has been dying a slow death for a long time. Evolutionists sometimes accuse creationists of taking the lazy way out, failing to explain something by giving up and saying, “God did it.” But in the sorry history of vestigial organ theory, isn’t the shoe on the other foot? Instead of finding the function of an unknown organ, evolutionists have tended to give up and say, “It’s just an evolutionary leftover.” A belief in creation, on the other hand, has often been the stimulus for outstanding scientific research, because of the conviction that nature is intelligible, follows intelligently-formulated laws, and possesses an underlying plan and design that can be discovered and utilized.
For “Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week,” let’s enter this line from the Nature Science Update article: “Why use muscle as the damping material, when practically any squashy material would do? One answer is that muscle just happens to be available – evolution didn’t equip horses with rubber washers.” No, Henry, the infinite-personal Creator gave them something far more wonderful: self-healing, self-regenerating, living dampers, filled with DNA code and molecular machines.
In our day of cars and freeways, we should still consider the marvel of the horse and camel. For thousands of years, these sturdy animals have been the staple of the human economy. As mounted police and rescue workers know, they still have superiority over man-made vehicles in many situations (plus, they can live off the land and don’t pollute). Horses are sleek, handsome, versatile, lovable animals, and now we find they are equipped with hi-tech shock absorbers, too. Get a horse.
Pack train in the Sierras
