Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
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Reply to <strong>Haldane</strong> 159<br />
4 Chicken <strong>and</strong> Egg<br />
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I am here indebted to a witty<br />
discussion note by Roger Teichmann. 21 Since each chicken is hatched from<br />
an egg <strong>and</strong> every egg is laid by a chicken, it would appear that neither can<br />
come first. On the other h<strong>and</strong> since the durations of the generations of<br />
chickens have a lower bound (so the sequence is not like, say, . . . 1 /8, 1 /4, 1 /2,<br />
1, . . . ) <strong>and</strong> because life on earth has not existed for ever, it would appear that<br />
there would have to be a first egg or first chicken. The answer of course must<br />
be that ‘chicken’ is a vague term. We get the same appearance of contradiction<br />
with any vague term, as is exemplified by the so-called Sorites paradox. If<br />
a man with only a few hairs on his head (say 10) is bald, so also is a man with<br />
one more hair (say 11). Also if a man with n hairs on his head is bald so is<br />
a man with (n + 1) hairs. (One more hair does not make the difference<br />
between being bald <strong>and</strong> being not bald.) So from this we seem to be able to<br />
deduce that the hairiest head of hair that you’ve ever seen is that of a bald<br />
man. Much has been written on the Sorites paradox, <strong>and</strong> as far as I know<br />
there is still no agreed solution. The trouble comes from the vagueness of<br />
language, as with ‘bald’. Similarly ‘chicken’ is vague. There is no first chicken.<br />
Species evolve imperceptibly from earlier species. Unless, of course, some<br />
miraculous occurrence singled out a first chicken or a first egg.<br />
We should take ‘egg’ here in the sense of ‘ovum’. (The eggs we eat consist<br />
mostly of nutrient for the growing chicken foetus.) Wouldn’t there have to be<br />
a first ovum? Well, there might have been a first coming together of bits of<br />
DNA to form the first prototype of bisexual reproduction, <strong>and</strong> one of them<br />
might be regarded as proto-egg <strong>and</strong> proto-sperm.<br />
<strong>Haldane</strong> likes to stress the discontinuities: the reproductive from the nonreproductive,<br />
the organic from the non-organic, the conceptual from the<br />
non-conceptual. 22 These things arise by sequences of small jumps. Each jump<br />
may have a low probability, but evolutionary time is long compared with the time<br />
of human affairs. If a jump consisted simultaneously of millions of jumps<br />
its probability would be exceedingly low. However, a sequence of millions<br />
of small jumps filtered by natural selection can have a much higher probability.<br />
There is a problem about how the evolution of a complex organ, such as the<br />
eye, might have occurred. The answer lies in the opportunist character of evolution<br />
whereby something that gives one sort of advantage at one stage may<br />
lead to different advantages at later stages. <strong>Haldane</strong> might say that small jumps<br />
are still jumps. So they are, but the smallest jumps are a matter of chance<br />
comings together <strong>and</strong> chance mutations. But you shouldn’t be reading me on<br />
this. Read the biologists <strong>and</strong> make up your own mind whether you think that<br />
the naturalist story or the supernaturalist story is the more plausible.