Why You Were Born and Not Hatched

Job 10:18a
“Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb?”

You can thank roving pieces of DNA that you were born rather than hatched from an egg. At least, that’s what evolutionary biologist Vincent Lynch and his team at the University of Chicago tell us. Science News magazine brings us the story about roving pieces of DNA that helped early mammals replace egg-laying in favor of giving birth to live young.

These “jumping genes” flipped the switch on thousands of genes, turning off ones that build hard eggshells and turning on genes that allow a fetus to develop in the uterus. Lynch said that the genes that turned on allowed the mother’s body to recognize she is pregnant. It then suppressed her immune system so her body didn’t sense the foreign DNA in the fetus and reject it. Animals that become pregnant, he continued, had the evolutionary advantage of carrying their developing young with them, rather than laying eggs in one spot where they’d be vulnerable to predators or unpredictable weather.

What the article fails to mention is that all of this – all of it – is sheer speculation. Can you imagine all of the millions of unaccounted-for changes that would need to take place to go from an egg-laying bird to a mammal that bears live young?

Just as you would expect from a team of evolutionary biologists, their research is built on the premise that evolution is a fact. They never even considered the more believable explanation that some creatures were designed to lay eggs and others were designed to give birth to live young.

Prayer:
Heavenly Father, help Your children learn how to differentiate between truth and error, facts and speculation. Guide us into Your truth, I pray. Amen.

Notes:
“Pregnancy in mammals evolved with help from roving DNA”, Science News, 1/29/15. Photo: Eggs of an ostrich, cassowary, chicken, flamingo, pigeon and blackbird. Courtesy of HTO. (CC-BY-SA 3.0)