A structure or organ is vestigial if it has diminished in size or usefulness in the course of evolution. Vestigial structures are markers of evolutionary descent. For example, boa constrictors, which are descended from four-legged reptiles, grow tiny...

Vestigiality describes homologous characters of organisms which have lost all or most of their original function in a species through evolution. These may take various forms such as anatomical structures, behaviors and biochemical pathways. Some of...

Richard John Neuhaus' observations in While We're At It (June/July) that the real battle over "the naked public square" is not the display there of "various public symbols, often of a vestigial nature," but "the exclusion of religion and religiously grounded arguments" could...

ABSTRACT Transvection is a phenomenon wherein gene expression is effected by the interaction of alleles in trans and often results in partial complementation between mutant alleles. Transvection is dependent upon somatic pairing between homologous chromosome regions and is a form of interallelic complementation...