lpetrich

This posting is in honor of the organ celebrated on Valentine's Day.

The origin of the heart has long been a murky question, but an interesting hypothesis has emerged in recent years: the first heart was essentially an ectopic throat that continued its swallowing action.

Checking on PubMed, I found several papers on a heart-throat connection. I searched for "tinman throat" and "tinman pharynx", where tinman is a gene involved in heart development in the lab fruit fly Drosophila. It was named after the Tin Woodman of the Wizard of Oz, who had had no heart.

That gene is related to NK2 genes involved in development of hearts and throats of zebrafish, Xenopus frogs, chickens, and mice, and even to a throat-development gene of nematodes. And the authors of one of those papers note
So every time your heart beats, it "swallows" blood. Gulp, gulp, gulp, ...

Undercurrent

And if there were creationists at that time:

"Evolutionists say this is an example of evolution in action, but the creature just has two throats. There's no new information here. Show me an example of a fundamentally new organ system developing. REPENT SINNER!"