Clearly, Before Chickens

Back when most Western painters were into realism, one classic challenge in learning how to paint was to depict nothing but a white egg resting on a white surface.  That challenge prevented novice painters from easily relying upon a contrast of colors between the egg and its background to depict dimensionality.  Instead, the painter had to represent the subtlest gradations from whites to near-whites to the lightest of grays made by sunlight as it faded around the eggs curvature.  Not to mention the subtle texture of the egg's surface.  I think it was an exercise fitting for an egg, which feels like a wondrous, beautifully polished stone when held in the hand.

We encounter eggs as food early in our lives, and they can come packaged with learning.  What elementary-school child has not at some point encountered the riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"  Even when not yet old enough to engage in abstract thinking, a child can taste of that impossible mental task of thinking back into an infinite regress of time.

One side-benefit of our modern knowledge about the evolution of life on this planet is that we can now answer the chicken-or-egg riddle definitively, although the answer might seem like cheating to some. Clearly, there were eggs before there were chickens -- reptile eggs, that is. (Not to mention the eggs without shells laid by nearly countless species of fish.)  Evolutionary biologists estimate that reptiles, with their ability to lay land-worthy eggs, have been on this planet twice as long as any birds.

ancient Egyptian god Ptah
creating cosmos as egg
on pottery wheel

Perceiving the potentiality that lies within eggs, faith-traditions in ancient times used the egg as a symbol for the cosmos.  In our highly secularized western societies, most people (even some ministers I have known) think of an Easter-egg hunt as just springtime fun.  But those Easter eggs (as well as rabbits, a prolific type) entered Christianity as symbols of new life.  Even today, a large porcelain egg or an ostrich egg hangs in some Coptic churches and mosques as a sign of rebirth and hope.

A peculiarity of chicken eggs many city-dwellers do not know about is that even though chicks come from eggs, hens can lay eggs without being fertilized by a rooster.  That seems counter-intuitive, given that the evolutionary value of fertilized eggs has been that of producing offspring.  Nevertheless, virtually all the chicken eggs marketed by grocers today in Western societies are infertile.  (In his early adulthood, Gandhi, staying in England, abstained from eating eggs so as to not take animal life -- until he was informed that those chicken eggs he was being offered could never have developed into a chick.)

Today, in watching nature shows on TV, I can experience something even more marvelous than being able to eat eggs while eating vegetarian.  I can watch as mother tortoises and other turtles use their clumsy-looking hind legs to dig a pit in the sand.  Then, out of their bodies emerge beautiful white ovals, looking so much like those familiar eggs we all know firsthand.  As part of a long line of reptiles, that mother turtles' usually private ritual dates back over 300 million years.

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Do you have any childhood memories about Easter eggs, other eggs, chicks, or chickens?