Vestigial Cetacean olfactory receptors

Like most consensus scientific theories, common descent is supported by patterns of evidence rather than by a few disconnected observations. As Stephen Jay Gould said, “We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information—not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.”