Among the potential benefits of causing a chicken embryo to develop dinosaurian characteristics is that this is a project that could capture the popular imagination. It could be a demonstration of evolution that would be felt at gut level by nonscientists who might be uninterested in the details of genomes and embryos.
Anything that brings home to the public the reality of evolution, and its place as the foundation idea of modern biology, is important. Anything that dispels the fog of confusion about science and religion would be enormously positive.
Hatching a dino-chicken would be shockingly vivid evidence of the reality of evolution – not a thought experiment but an Oprah-ready show-and-tell exhibit. The creature would be its own sound- and vision-bite. It certainly wouldn't convince anybody who didn't want to be convinced. But it would cause discussion and thought.
Creating a demonstration suitable for sound-bite television is not, however a reason to do scientific experiments. In order to get to the point where the question “How did you do that?” could be answered, we would have to learn a great deal. And we would tie molecular biology to macroevolution. We would zero in on a significant passage in vertebrate evolution, the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds, and pin it down to molecular changes in embryonic cells.
This is the heart of the promise of evolutionary developmental biology.
Vertebrate paleontology may seem to be so remote from the daily problems of the modern world that it exists apart from society. If I were to be harsh, I might ask, “What good is it?”
There is an aspect of vertebrate paleontology that is highly useful and of great importance to us as vertebrates. That vertebrate body plan is one we share with dinosaurs, chickens, and countless other creatures.
The result of this commonality of life, in this case in the specific fraternity of four-limbed vertebrates, is that lessons we learn about the growth of any tetrapod embryos may have significance for the growth of human embryos.
If we learn about the growth factors that signal the neural tube to continue developing, it's possible that this knowledge could be useful in preventing birth defects.
In spina bifida, for instance, incomplete development of the spinal cord can leave an infant with painful and sometimes lethal birth defects.
In the 1980s researchers pinned down the importance of folic acid to the development of the spinal cord in human embryos. This discovery was made partly by gathering information about the diets of pregnant women and the incidence of spinal-cord birth defects like spina bifida, and partly with animal research. The simple remedy of adding folic acid to the diet of pregnant women now prevents countless cases of these defects.
Knowing that there are great potential benefits answers some questions about whether such research should be done. But there are others. Is it a morally justifiable act to play with life in order to go back in time? Is it cruel? Is it dangerous?
Experimentation of all sorts on chicken embryos is widely accepted and, I think, the correct assumption is that we are not causing the embryo pain. As to ultimately sacrificing the embryo, or a fully grown chicken, there are far greater injustices and indignities that billions of chickens face every day. Common sense would suggest that not allowing an egg to hatch, or humanely killing even a full-grown chicken, are actions that society recognizes as legitimate, given even the small return of a meal. The potential return is much greater here.
