My Chinny Chin Chin

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The title of this article is MY CHINNY CHIN CHIN with a picture of piglet looking over a fence.

“Little pig, little pig, let me come in. Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.” That familiar line comes from “The Three Little Pigs,” published in The Nursery Rhymes of England in 1886. It captures the pig's response to the wolf's request to enter the pig's home for nefarious purposes. The pig's clever retort could be stated less poetically as “Absolutely not!”

To analyze this quote scientifically, we might ask whether pigs actually have chins. According to the scientific definition of chins, the answer is “absolutely not.” A recent scientific study stated that no other mammals, not even chimpanzees, have chins. Only humans possess chins. The respected science journal PLOS One published a study exploring why humans have chins. The researchers aimed to determine whether our chins resulted from direct natural selection or are merely a by-product of other factors.

The issue is that my chinny chin chin serves no clear survival purpose and thus cannot be directly explained by the evolutionary process of natural selection or survival of the fittest. Because the human chin is unique, anthropologists use it as a distinguishing feature for identifying our species, Homo sapiens, in the fossil record.

Evolutionists have proposed several explanations for why we humans have chins. One suggestion is that they help facilitate chewing, but many mammals without chins can chew foods that humans cannot. Another idea is that the chin provides more space for our thick tongues, which are crucial for speech. Even sexual selection of mates has been proposed as an evolutionary explanation for chins. However, according to the article in PLOS One, “none of these hypotheses have received strong support” for various reasons.

The study's author, Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, a professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo, suggests that the uniqueness of the human chin “does not mean that it was shaped by natural selection to enhance an animal's survivability.” As for this animal — or human — I believe my chinny chin chin is part of God's unique design for his creatures, created in his spiritual image.

— Roland Earnst

Scripture links/references are from BibleGateway.com. Unhighlighted scriptures can be looked up at their website.