Breaking Eggs

A new That’s a Fact video has at last arrived. It’s called Jurassic Omelette – or, according to their website, “Jurassic Omemette.” They have at least fixed that now, though they’re yet to change the URL.

The subject matter should be broadly familiar. The video starts off with asking “which came first – the chicken or the egg?” before moving on to the dinosaur egg protein issue from the other week. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, however.

So which came first – the chicken or the egg? The chicken, of course! If you don’t have a chicken, you can forget about that omelette.

…But if you don’t have an egg, you can forget about the chicken and the omelette. The chicken or egg problem is an old philosophical circular reference paradox for which there is no truly satisfying answer – the ICR believes they have a solution: “The chicken, of course!” While not explained in this video, they note that birds were created by God in Genesis 1 & 2, hence the chicken must have been created prior to the first egg. This falls down, however, when it is realised that the chicken – being a domesticated Red Junglefowl – was created not by God but by man. Thus the paradox still applies – did the first chicken egg appear before the first chicken, or was it the other way around?

An evolutionary solution (albeit one that, given the domestication situation above, can still be used in the fantasy world of modern young Earth creationism) involves pointing out that egg-laying animals, whether the Red Junglefowl or more ancient beasts, have existed long before the origin of the chicken. While this is a technical solution to the question posed, it was implied that it was a chicken egg that was involved. Still not a very good out, then.

Continuing:

Did you know that it takes twenty-four hours for a hen to produce an egg? What’s more amazing is that she only needs a 30 minute break before she starts again. What makes eggs white or brown? Feathers. That’s right. Hens with white feathers and earlobes make white eggs, and hens with red or brown feathers and earlobes make brown eggs. And each egg has as many as seventeen thousand tiny pores around its surface. But what about eggs from other creatures? Eggs come in many sizes, shapes, and colours, from quail eggs to robin eggs to chicken eggs to enormous ostrich eggs.

I don’t know how much of that is true, but I do know that it’s not important here. The above paragraph simply functions as an inefficient segue to subject that they really want to talk about.

And there are dinosaur eggs. That’s right, from time to time palaeontologists uncover fossilised dinosaur eggs that were destroyed before hatching.

See? Here we go.

Recently a study was conducted on fossilised sauropod eggs in the Yunnan province of China.

There are numerous problems with the retelling presented here – I invite you to read over the earlier post for context. The first, relatively minor issue is that the eggs were not from sauropods, but from sauropodomorphs, a broader grouping of animals.

The eggs contain the tiny bones of the unborn dinosaurs which, according to scientists, fell victim to cataclysmic flooding.

I don’t know which scientists the ICR has been talking to, but the ones that wrote the actual paper were of the opinion that, while flooding was involved, it was explicitly not “cataclysmic.” If the energy levels were anything like that which the ICR claims the “tiny bones” would have been scattered to the ends of the Earth.

And within the bones, scientists have identified the remnants of proteins that could only have existed for thousands of years,not 190 million years as some suggest.

Interesting how they’ll take the words of “scientists” as gospel truth in one breath while they are dismissed as merely “some” in the next. And once again, even if the proteins could only last thousands of years – in which case why don’t we see any here? – how do they know how long the remnents could last? This sentence is a real bait-and-switch.

And these facts support the idea of a global, catastrophic flood, like in the time of Noah, occurring just thousands of years ago.

No, no they don’t. The video finishes with the customary collection of non sequiturs:

So as much as we all enjoy a hearty breakfast, science does have it’s limits, and a Jurassic park omelette is not on the menu.

This conclusion might actually make sense if the subject of the video was why dinosaur eggs were too old to extract DNA for cloning, but so far as I can tell it was not.