In a rather stentorian article on FOX News today, it was announced that scientists have finally DISCOVERED the answer to one of life’s most puzzling questions.
The article puts it this way:
“British scientists believe they have found the answer to an ages-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“Scientists cracked the puzzle after discovering that the formation of eggs is possible only thanks to a protein found in chicken’s ovaries. That means eggs have to be formed in chickens first.”
“The protein — called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) — speeds up the development of the shell. Researchers from Sheffield and Warwick universities in England laid out their findings in the paper “Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein.”
“They used a supercomputer to zoom in on the formation of an egg and realized the protein is vital in kick-starting the crystallization process. It works by converting calcium carbonate into the calcite crystals that make up the egg shell.”
(Source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/14/chicken-egg-mystery-finally-cracked)
This was A PUZZLE?
An AGE-OLD QUESTION??
Personally, I find this whole story rather hilarious!
Okay, I admit I’m not some egghead (pardon the pun) scientist with a bunch of degrees after my name. But the idea that this was a puzzle, or an ages-old question just strikes me as a bit ludicrous!
All you have to do is consider one simple point:
If the egg came first, how did it get there?
Eggs don’t lay themselves!
Ask any farm kid who has ever had the job of collecting them!
But let’s explore this question a little further:
Was this another great idea evolution came up with? That it would just “evolve” an egg that would become a chicken after a few million years or so? How long did it take to get the process right?
Till an egg actually WAS an egg?
And once it got that process right, how much longer did it take to get that egg to become a chicken?
Maybe that’s how all these other species that lay eggs got started!
Maybe while it was trying to turn that egg into a chicken, evolution came up with fish eggs, insect eggs, bee eggs. . . .even dinosaur eggs!!
And once it got hold of THAT idea, how long did it take evolution to begin evolving those eggs into those other species?
In the words of Dr. Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University’s Department of Engineering Materials, “It had long been suspected that the egg came first — but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first.”
(Source quoted above)
If there hadn’t been a chicken to lay the egg, there wouldn’t BE any egg! Not only do eggs not lay themselves, they don’t MAKE themselves! There has to be a process that gets the whole thing started.
Common sense alone tells us that!
But these guys apparently needed more than common sense. They needed a super computer!
Another quote from the same article states:
“It is hoped the DISCOVERY (emphasis mine) will lead to new inventions.”
What discovery?
They didn’t discover anything! They only PROVED what anyone could figure out for themselves!
But let’s give them credit for one thing:
They proved eggs DO come from chickens.
That may be a great eye-opener to anyone who believed they came from styro foam cartons you get at the grocery store!
