Hi,

I read your post and your questions and I think that all of your objections to evolution seem to originate from the same root. You don't 'buy' that evolution can create designs as marvelous and complicated as the human body or the balance of our ecosystem or egg births.

I don't blame you. It's a lot to ask for someone to make him believe that molecules HAPPENED to get combined in such a way that a fish was created, and it so happened that there's smaller organisms in the sea that the fish can digest just fine and later lay EGGS to re-produce more fish. It's pretty much the same as the theorem with the monkey and the typewriter, expecting that if we leave that monkey typing for a few billion years, eventually it will come up with a Shakespeare play. It's not going to happen, because Shakespeare didn't just punched keys randomly, he had an understanding of the English language and he was conveying a story based on human experience and his imagination. The only way for a monkey to reproduce, say one page, of one of his plays would be to type ALL possible combinations of the English characters that would fit in one page, a task that would take no less than trillions of years or so, depending on the monkey's typewriting skills.

So how come people believe in such crap? To understand how evolution works you'll have to keep in mind that although chance plays a very strong role in all this, there is a very important rule that filters the random probability into meaningful results and 'flawless' designs. That rule is called 'survival of the fittest' which means that if a design is not 'fit' then it will be discarded, otherwise it will survive. Survival is very important because the surviving designs will spawn new designs based on that one but with minor random alterations(this is where chance comes from). Due to simplicity I will ignore mating(cross-over DNA from the mother and the father) and will assume autogamy. So, to demonstrate I want to give you an example of evolution in a much smaller problem than life:

I ask from 5 people to guess what my first name is (you can play this game at home):

A says my name is John.
B says it's Henry.
C says it's Bob.
D says it's David.
E says it's Alex.

Now I decide which one of them is the most fit. Fittest in evolution means who is closer to the solution of the problem. In real life, 'the problem' is who is the most compatible with its living environment but in our game its who is closer to my first name. I choose B, so he gets to 'survive' the next round and spawn 5 children. Everyone will now choose a new name based on B's answer but slightly altered.

A says Harold.
B says Howard.
C says Perry.
D says Lenny.
E says Hector.

I choose D and we go over it one more time:

A says Lemmy.
B says Denny.
C says Lex.
D says Larry.
E says Benny.

Larry would be right and D wins the game. So with a bit of chance, and me picking up a winner for each round, my name was guessed out of 10,000 possible male names, with under 15 guesses.

This is the same way evolution works. Fish using eggs in birth may seem complex indeed but it evolved that way. I'm sure that at some point there were other fish species as well that gave birth without an egg, or eggs from harder or softer material, etc. In the first case, I guess the newborn wouldn't survive without a protecting surrounding(the egg) at its current environment(the sea), so that specie got wiped out. Likewise, the softer eggs might have made it more attractive to other fish to hunt as food while the harder eggs would maybe make it impossible for the newborn to eventually break out from. So by natural selection, the fish we see today survived while others did not. It won't be absurd to assume that in many years from now, a series of mutations could evolve a certain specie of humans to hatch instead of getting pregnant as well. It could prove that eggs help a human grow quicker or better, maybe giving them longer life expectancy, or making them prettier, or anything that could help them live a better life in their environment than ordinary humans. Humans are mammals and just as mammals evolved from older species, likewise they can give birth to a new kind. If you ask yourself, why this hasn't happened yet, keep in mind that natural evolution does not examine all possibilities(it would take forever) so it cannot always guarantee an optimal solution to a problem. So, I don't know about eggs, but to the question: "Is humans the best organism possible for our current environment?" the answer is surely no.