The Chicken and the Egg

The ancient dilemma, though I hope Peter & Paul didn't have to worry about it. 

 Which came first?

Years have passed since I wrote an essay by that title. Anyone interested will find it in Beyond Religion vol. III. Hopefully, I have increases my knowledge since. Scientists, like ostriches, are hiding behind the minutia of atoms and ever smaller sub-nuclear array of particles, which obscure their vision of the big picture. Like the Universe, for instance. Or the essence of man.

They study the chicken having, apparently, no idea where the egg came from. I don’t been physically. They probable peeked. No. I mean they have no idea how can an egg, human or otherwise, possess all the knowledge to create a chicken—or a human being, for that matter.

They think that our brains generate our thoughts. And lots and lots of thoughts make up a mind, I suppose? They think that when we change our minds it is because the neurons have changed their relationship to each other, or the axons began firing along a different protocol. They always take the result as the cause.

They chicken always comes before the egg.

Now, for just a moment, let us forget about the chicken. Let us think of a human body… and the human egg. While still a fetus, a woman has more than 7 million eggs. By the time she’s born the number falls to 1 or 2 million, and by the time she reaches puberty, the number of eggs falls to about 300,000. But not to worry, she might well be able to produce more eggs after she’s born.

That’s not my point.

My point is that a human oocyte, or egg, in spite of the profusion of its numbers, is about 100 micrometers in diameter. That’s quite large as cells go, but try looking at it this way:

1000 micrometers = 1 millimeter

so 100 micrometers = 0.1 millimeters

Enough said, the egg is about one tenth of a millimeter.

Now take sperm. (Well, don’t take it, just think about it).. A man ejaculates, on average, some 280 million sperm in the hope that one of them will reach and penetrate an egg. It seems like a lot until we realize that while a mouse ejaculates only 50 million sperm at a time, a pig leaves us, humans, well behind with 8,000,000,000 sperm in each ejaculation. So when you hear that some men are pigs that is not true. It takes almost 30 men to match a single pig. Although, I am told, that our obesity has already surpassed that of a pig.

(In parenthesis, I wonder who took the trouble to count 8,000,000,000 pig sperm. Still, I suppose this is what scientists do).

Here, I must apologize. None of the above has anything to do with what I want to say. What I am leading to is that a single sperm the size of some 40 microns in length (a rat’s is 4x longer!), that’s 0.001574” for those imperially inclined, and a single egg of 0.1 of a millimeter in diameter, have all the knowledge necessary to build you and me, and every other human  being on earth. It doesn’t take much, does it.

Got it?

A smidgen of virtually invisible bit of biological stuff knows exactly how to build an Einstein, a Mozart, a Leonardo da Vinci and a 1000 other geniuses who all sprang from this bit of stuff. At least, the scientists would have you believer that.

Allow me to suggest otherwise.

As I already mentioned, the world is set on automatic. All women have eggs, all men have sperm (well, most of us). What those eggs and sperm know how to do is how to created a biological computer, which, thereafter, and under strict though subconscious supervision, the geniuses of our species can use to do their thing.

Otherwise we’d all be geniuses, and not stupid. Well, most of us.