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Ask most people what they know about the mechanics of sexual reproduction and you are likely to get anything from a reproachful sneer to a dirty joke. Most of us have been told at some time or another that the sperm meets the egg and ultimately a baby is produced. The dynamics of what really takes place, however, is so incredibly complex that John Medina’s book The Outer Limits of Life (1991, Oliver-Nelson Books, Nashville) consumes 282 pages in just generally describing the process.
The human sperm consists of a head and a tail. The head contains two parts, one part being the nucleus which contains the genetic information for the father’s part of the genetic makeup of the child. No further information is needed for the sperm to do its task (there is no messenger RNA). Unlike most cell nuclei, there are no holes (called nuclear pores) for communication with the outside world. The sperm is singularly programmed to do its job.
The second part of the head of the sperm is called the acrosome. The acrosome is the part of the sperm that enables penetration of the egg. This is done by enzymes that can digest proteins, sugars, and the materials of which the outside of the egg is made. The tail of the sperm has a mid-section that contains tiny energy sources called mitochondria. The remainder of the tail looks like uncooked spaghetti noodles. These “noodles” slide and ratchet past each other, giving a wiggling and writhing motion that causes the head of the sperm to rotate 180° every time there is motion in the tail and moves the sperm along at a rate of about five inches per hour.
The joining of the sperm and the egg is called “one of God’s greatest miracles” by Medina (page 87). As the sperm finds the egg, it encounters an object which is as much larger than the sperm is as a basketball compares to a paper clip. The sperm must first of all penetrate the thick outer layer of the egg called the zona pellucida which contains protein that enables the sperm’s outer protein to fit into it. The egg’s protein (called ZP3) prevents sperm from other animals from entering the egg. If the ZP3 is removed, sperm from other animals can fertilize the egg. There is also sugar in the ZP3 which the sperm digests. When this happens, the acrosomal section of the head of the sperm dumps its enzymes on the zona pellucida and a hole is opened up into the egg. The head and tail of the sperm minus the nucleus is then digested by the egg with the sperm’s nucleus left floaing in the egg’s cytoplasm.
Remember that thousands of sperm are trying to do this all at once. When a sperm’s nucleus enters the egg, three things are done within seconds to prevent any other sperm from putting its nucleus inside the egg. First, an electrical change occurs in the membrane of the egg. Second, the egg makes a change in the zona pellucida that hardens it into a form of cement, and finally a chemical that consumes sugar is released, stopping the sperm from attaching to the outside of the egg. All of this is just the starting point for conception. We have left out hundreds of details, not all of which is understood. Now the nine-month (plus) process that will culminate in a baby ready to live in the outside world begins.
David said in Psalm 139, “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Just a superficial understanding of what happens in the complex process of sexual reproduction should convince us of the impossibility of explaining all of this by chance. God has designed a system that is so successful that man now must learn to use it wisely so as not to strain the resources of all kinds available to him.

—John Clayton, Dandy Designs, May/June, 1995


Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net

Reproduction of life is an incredibly complicated and interesting area of study. From the amoeba to the human being, there are a multiplicity of sophisticated methods and strategies that allow reproduction to take place. Articles by evolutionists, creationists, and everyone in between speak of the elegant and complex design that allows reproduction to take place. The design of a pine cone which allows aerodynamic pollination to take place is one of a myriad of interesting plant reproduction techniques.

Pine trees are classified as gymnosperms by botanists. The ovule which contains the egg is not enclosed in a container as is the case in other plants. The ovule has an open end called a micropyle which carries the sperm from the pollen to the egg. In a pine tree, there are small cones growing in clusters. These small ones have pollen-producing chambers which release pollen with its sperm to the air. Female pine cones grow singularly and are generally larger. The problem is one of how to get pollen from the male to the micropyle of the female by wind alone.

Karl J. Niklas at Cornell University has discovered that female pine cones are “aerodynamically designed to filter large amounts of pollen from the air.” Using helium filled bubbles and a wind tunnel, they were able to show that the shape of the interior area of the pine cone funnels wind so that the wind’s contents will be deposited right on top of the micropyle. Would this pattern not deposit everything on top of the micropyle—dust, other plants’ pollen and precipitation?

Each plant’s cone has a slightly different shape than every other plant. In addition to that, each plant’s pollen has a different size and density. Only one density and volume will accumulate right at the micropyle. All other densities will end up somewhere else in the cone, but not where it needs to be to reach the micropyle and ultimately the ovule.

In addition to this incredible system, there are all kinds of other features that can be used to assist gymnosperm reproduction. In some pine trees, the pollen is not released until temperatures approaching 1,000° reaches them. Such pines are ideally designed to re-seed a forest fire area when all other plant life may have been destroyed. The very fact that those who study these features see them as an indication of a high level of design shows that intelligence is involved in the process. To see this intelligence to be a product of chance would seem to this writer to be a greater leap of faith than to recognize a master aeronautical engineer—a God of infinite knowledge that designed and planned all reproductive systoms.

(Data taken from “Aerodynamics of Wind Pollination” by Karl Niklas, Scientific American, July, 1987, pages 90-95.)

—John Clayton, Dandy Designs, November/December, 1994

Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net

Practice Makes Perfect

Every now and then I get the yen to become a gourmet cook. I get out The Joy of Cooking, study menus and recipes, admire the elegantly decorated cakes, drool over the endless possibilities. And then I open a can of soup for supper.

Is it possible that we sometimes practice Christianity the way I cook? Do we spend more time with the Book than actually combining ingredients to make a better self? Do we memorize scripture, “chapter and verse,” in order to tell others about our faith and then fail to tell them with our lives?

Think of the people who have meant the most to you. Was their religion more obvious in word or in deed? I have learned more about the realities of Christianity from the life of a righteous alcoholic than from all the preachers I have ever heard. And if you think “righteous alcoholic” is a contradiction in terms, you have truly missed a blessing.

We have not been admonished to go out and stir up controversy in order to show off our Bible knowledge. If the way we live is not of such quality as to evoke curiosity about our faith, what good does it do to have a ready answer?

If reading a book about cooking or basketball or music is of little value without regular practice, how much more vigilant we should be to subject Christianity to daily workouts, to be like Christ, not just talk about him. We can hardly hope to convert our neighbors simply by using scripture to prove a point in an argument.

Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net