This may sound at first like a silly question, but biology is rife with similar examples of this circularity, and it's a perplexing problem for those who believe that the development of biological novelty in nature proceeded through purely naturalistic processes.
Brazilian biochemist Marcos Eberlin, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and author of over 800 scientific articles as well as the new book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, talks about several examples of this problem in an article at Stream.
Here are some excerpts:
A chick embryo’s development is a wonder to behold. So too is the egg in which it develops. The egg yolk and egg white contain just the right food the chick will need before it hatches. The eggshell also has microscopic pores that let air in so the chick can breathe. The developing bird then generates a network of capillaries to absorb oxygen from the air and release carbon dioxide.Eberlin argues that there are numerous examples of this kind of circularity in nature. Another example is the cell membrane which requires specialized proteins made only in the cell. Yet before the membranes existed to encase the cell there would have been no cells, but until there were cells there were no specialized proteins out of which to construct the membranes. So how did the cell ever come about?
Just before hatching, special membranes in the egg trap enough air so the chick can take its first breath before it leaves the shell.
The eggshell is hard enough to protect the developing chick, yet fragile enough for the full-grown chick to peck its way out. The shell and its contents are masterpieces of engineering that both nourish and protect the baby bird.
But there would be no egg without a chicken to produce it. Without an egg there can be no chicken, but without a chicken there can be no egg. How could the system have evolved one small functional step at a time? It’s an old question, one that Darwinists would like you to think they have answered satisfactorily, and long ago. They haven’t.
The chicken-and-egg problem is the archetypal example of causal circularity. To get A we need B, but to get B we first need A. We can’t have one without the other. To get both together, we need foresight — an engineer capable of planning for the future.
Another example is the nucleic acid/protein complex. DNA and RNA manufacture proteins but in order for these nucleic acids to function they need a suite of proteins to assist them in their work, but the proteins are made by the nucleic acids. So how did the nucleic acids make proteins before there were proteins?
Eberlin argues that these circularities in nature can only be resolved by foresight and that foresight requires a mind:
First, we see many instances of causal circularity in biology. These pose engineering challenges whose solutions require on-time delivery of multiple, essential, and well-orchestrated parts.He concludes, therefore, that the evidence points to the existence of an intelligent mind:
Second, we know from our uniform experience that the ability to anticipate and solve such problems before they happen is a unique characteristic of intelligent minds.
Third, there are no demonstrated examples of unguided, mindless processes anticipating and solving problems that require a sophisticated orchestration of fine-tuned parts, all brought together for an origin event. Hand-waving references to cases that are assumed rather than demonstrated do not count.
Our uniform experience provides us with only one type of cause with the demonstrated capacity to anticipate and solve such problems .... The evidence in biology for a designer with foresight is not merely apparent. It is insistently real.Eberlin gives much more fascinating detail about the cell membrane and the nucleic acid/protein complex in the article, which is neither long nor technical. Check it out.
