Vestigial Quotes

We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix. (Jerry Coyne)
Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist-that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is-both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology-of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
H. P. Lovecraft
Powell repressed the wave of exasperation that rose up in him. It was not exasperation with Chooka. It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.
Alfred Bester
Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that's when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.
P. J. O'Rourke
But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.
Rob Sheffield
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.
Dan Simmons
Competition with women is almost always a net loss of honor for a man. Men don't consider competition between men and women to be "apples to apples." I don't think women do either... What does a man have to gain? He shows no courage by entering the ring with a woman. He is expected to win. If he does, his victory is shallow and unsavory. He gains no honor in beating a woman- the idea is offensive even to a modern man's vestigial sense of chivalry.
Jack Donovan