Back when I was a lad, I had a thing for horror novels. In fact, I imagined that one day I would write horror novels as a career. It wasn’t until years later that I published two short stories in a horror magazine and then read the other entries in the magazine that I changed this opinion. Horror, it dawned on me, was lame. However, in those formative years I read a tremendous amount of horror fiction from a variety of sources. One of my favorite sets of books was The Exorcist, and later Legion, by William Peter Blatty.
I’m pretty sure that it was Legion that tackled evolution, but I could be wrong. At any rate, I remember really enjoying the philosophical debates about evolution that are documented in the book. As a young Christian lad, they resounded with me, and the fact that the feeling the reader is left with includes a loving hand of God made that young Christian in me awful pleased. The one argument that stayed with me, and that I later came to recognize as fallacious, was the idea of the egg.
I’m going somewhere with this, trust me.
I’m stretching the ole’ gray matter back a long ways, but if I’m right in my remembrances, Kinderman talks about the incredible requirements of an egg. It would have to have a food source. It would have to have a bladder. It would have to be tough enough to protect but not so tough that the embryo could not escape. The embryo would need an egg tooth. And on and on and on, he listed the many things that an egg would need in order to succeed, and if any one of those features was not present, the embryo would die. Later in life I would learn that this is the argument from irreducible complexity.
That little nugget lay dormant, waiting for a moment to pop out on the blog and have it’s day in court. Fortunately, I just read an article entitled Godawful science reporting: MSNBC says the chicken came before the egg, and it made me remember. Also, as I am about to publish this article, I see that PZ Myers has his own post on the subject.
The article is obviously critical of the opinions of some British scientists who, at least according to MSNBC (and I haven’t read their findings) say that because a particular protein in the chicken is required for egg formation, clearly you had to have chickens before you had eggs. Dr. Coyne quite rightly slaps them in the mouth. Eggs existed in dinosaurs. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. Chickens evolved from birds. Eggs existed long before chickens, and the ability to create this protein would have been an adaptation that came millions of years before the chicken got on the scene. Duh.
But it’s not like one day a chicken (or even a dinosaur) woke up and said, “Golly, I seem to have developed the ability to generate a protein that encases my young in a hard shell. Yay me!” This is the same logical mistake that I was talking about a few paragraphs ago. Evolution isn’t overnight, it’s a long process of gradual and seemingly insignificant changes that build together over time.
It is just as wrong to imagine that an egg in a reptile came out with all of the adaptations in place. All of these features were little graduations of change over who knows how many years. Maybe it starts with a reptile who produces slightly harder eggs. Those eggs are less easy to eat than other of the same species, and thus the little buggers have an easier time surviving. Over time, the eggs become more and more rigid. Embryos begin to use their mouths to aid them in getting out of the egg. Etc. etc. etc.
I don’t know what happened to evolve the egg. I’m just running with a thought above, and not in any way saing this is how evolution happened. I wasn’t there. No mammals were. Perhaps experts have a clearer picture than I, but that’s not the point. The point is that there is nothing irreducibly complex about an egg. It is a fundamental lack of understanding of evolution that leads to these thoughts.
Sorry, Mr. Blatty.
Jim
