A fishy story
by Carl Wieland
‘Tweed boy had fish gills in his neck’. The headline was not that of
some cheap tabloid paper, the type which is as likely to feature a phony photograph
of a goat-human hybrid as to report Elvis running a hamburger cafe in Tibet. It
was a respected Australian regional daily, The Northern Star (New South
Wales) of October 30, 1993 (‘Tweed’ in the headline refers to the town
of Tweed Heads).
The fuss was about a small fragment of cartilage (10-15 millimetres long) which
had been removed from the neck of an 11-year-old boy. It was referred to as a ‘fish
gill’, and as ‘fish gill cartilage’. The parents were reported
as saying, ‘The doctor told us that if our son had been a fish he would be
able to breath [sic] under water.[1] He said it was a gill — like
in a fish’.
The report seemed to directly quote a medical authority as saying that the tissue
found in this boy’s neck was hard cartilage ‘exactly the same as found
in the gills of fish’. Little wonder that the boy had experienced ‘some
teasing at school’!
Human cartilage
A scar on the boy’s neck shows where the alleged ‘fish gill’ cartilage
was removed. Occasionally, human cartilage may be abnormally ‘seeded’
during development of the embryo, and this is what grows in a person’s neck.
The cartilage taken from the boy’s neck is about the size of one of Australia’s
smallest coins. The pathologist who examined the ‘fish gill’ cartilage
confirmed that its microscopic appearance was indistinguishable from human cartilage.
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Knowing that we humans have human (not fish) DNA and can therefore make only human
(not fish) cartilage, I rang the pathologist referred to in the article, who confirmed
that the histology (microscopic appearance) of this cartilage was not in any way
distinguishable from ordinary human cartilage.
The whole article seemed to be strongly promoting the mistaken belief that the human
embryo, as it develops, goes through the stages of its pre-human evolutionary ancestry.
It actually stated that in the first few weeks of life the human fetus ‘develops
six gills’.
Few, if any, respected embryologists today accept this belief that the human fetus
repeats its past evolutionary history. In a major textbook on human development
(Jan Langman, Medical Embryology, fourth edition, Williams & Wilkins,
Baltimore, 1981) we read that ‘in the human embryo real gills — branchia
— are never formed’.2
Superficial similarity
There are pouch-like structures which form in the fish embryo and which look superficially
similar to the pharyngeal pouches or grooves in the human embryo (these were formerly
incorrectly called branchial (i.e. gill) grooves). However, whereas in fish this
region develops gills, in humans it forms very important, and quite different, structures
in the head and neck region, structures which have nothing to do with gills in either
form or function.
These structures include several which contain cartilage (such as the voice-box,
or larynx). So it is not at all surprising, in a fallen world, that there should
occasionally be an aberration of normal embryonic development, such that a clump
of laryngeal-type cartilage (for example) is incorrectly ‘seeded’ in
the side of the neck during development in the womb, and begins growing.
Actually, such ‘embryonic rests’ or ‘remnants’ (not remnants
of our evolutionary ancestry, but remnants of our own tissue which ended up in the
wrong place), when they involve softer tissues than cartilage, are well-known in
the neck region.3 So-called ‘cartilage rests’, as in this
case, are much rarer, but have been described.4 There is therefore no
mystery, and no evolutionary significance, to finding this tiny scrap of ordinary
human cartilage in a human neck.
It is tragic how readily the secular media, which will give virtually no exposure
to visits by distinguished creation scientists, will publish such misleading and
erroneous reports which reinforce evolutionary beliefs.
Footnotes
- Strictly speaking, this sentence is true — if their son had been
a fish, he would have been able to breathe underwater — because he
would then have been designed to do so, with real gills!
- Regrettably, many doctors have not yet caught up with this information. In Creation
magazine (Vol.14 No.3) we reported a respected Melbourne surgeon as saying that
the vast majority of fifth-year medical students under his tutelage believe that
the embryo does have gills — although their third-year text (quoted
above) makes it plain that this belief is false.
- These are called ‘branchial’ cysts, because the tissues, like the cartilage
in question, were believed to derive from the inappropriately named ‘branchial’
region of the embryo. However, many experts now believe ‘branchial’
cysts develop secondary to changes that occur within lymph nodes in the neck in
early adult life, and have nothing to do with the branchial region. Openings to
the surface (known as branchial sinuses) also result from developmental problems
or surgical intervention into one of the cysts mentioned above. I recall that as
a lad our family doctor told me about such a discharging neck sinus in one of his
patients, and convinced me that it was a gill opening from that patient’s
fish ancestor. I realized later, while at medical school (though still then an evolutionist),
that this not uncommon condition was probably a failure of two embryonic components
to fuse correctly, something like a harelip or cleft palate. It had nothing to do
with the functional openings in real gills.
- See Archives of Surgery 1934 Vol. 28 pp 59-65. Not surprisingly, the case
described therein also had other congenital deformities noticed on X-ray; a failure
of normal fusion/development of some of the bones in the upper spine.
(Source: Madeleine Doherty, The Northern Star, October 30, 1993, p. 3.)
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