Egg--The Bridge Between Generations

Duration: 4 hours

Target Audience: Anyone who is interested in science, life, joy, nature and the cosmos

Brief:

The universe came from nothingness, from a void, according to big bang theory. The mathematical representation of a void is the symbol ‘0’ we use for zero. A physical shape in 3D that closely resembles this symbol is an egg. 

The design motto of Nature seems to be  ex ovo omnia  (everything comes from an egg). All animals are born from eggs. All plants and trees are born from seeds. A seed, more or less, looks like an egg. All life begins in a fertilized egg, whether in plants or animals with few exceptions (Amoeba, Hydra, Sponge, Anemone et al.).

In the other lectures on nature we saw many mysteries of Nature that scientists have explored and explained in recent times. We saw the science behind a lotus leaf (hydrophobicity), gecko’s foot (van der wall forces), blue-moth butterfly (light iridescence), cocklebur (Velcro loop-hook), electric eel (bioelectricity), shark-skin (hydrodynamics), abalone shell (composite materials), bat (sonar) and so on.

But, these are insignificant, compared to the intelligence and love ensconced in an egg, for the following reasons: 

1. An egg is a single cell, and is the largest.
   
2. An egg survives outside the animal’s body whereas no other cells can survive outside the body.
3. The egg is surely one of the Nature’s most remarkable and versatile inventions. It is a compact, self-contained capsule containing everything necessary for the creation of new life—be it a moth, a frog, a fish, an ostrich, or a human being.
4. For millions of years the egg has carried life from one generation to the next.
5. There is no answer to the old riddle: “Chicken first or the egg first.”
   

Of all the mysteries of life one of the most intriguing is animal metamorphosis— the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, or of a tadpole into a frog, or of an egg into a chicken —has long fascinated naturalists and scientists.

How a chicken makes an egg, and how an egg becomes a chicken is a deep intriguing mystery. Developmental biology has understood and explained some bits and pieces of this process. We cannot create an egg from a handful of grain, but a chicken does it all the time. All birds do it, including some mammals (Echidna, Platypus, and Spiny Anteater). The extraordinary intelligence of this process is embedded in their bodies, not in their minds. Ten thousand Nobel laureates can neither explain nor duplicate this process— a handful of grain becoming an egg —in their labs.

The power of the egg’s symbolism is enhanced by its beauty of form and coloring. Fifty years ago, the naturalist T. W. Higginson wrote: “ I think if required on pain of death to name the most perfect thing in the universe, I should risk my fate on a bird’s egg.”  Not only a bird’s egg, but the tiny sculptured button of a butterfly egg and the translucent pearl of a snail egg have their own beauty. But beyond the mystical and aesthetic appreciation of eggs, there is the enormous biological interest of the strategies employed by so many animals in fertilizing, laying, and caring for their eggs.

If the egg is a fertilized one, then, it could become a chick. A chicken egg becomes a chick in 21 days (going through several stages of developmental biology). The bird egg is a self-contained life-support system for the development of bird embryo. All the nutrients, minerals, energy sources and water utilized by the embryo during incubation are already present in the freshly laid egg. 

For millions of years the egg has carried life from one generation to the next. Many ancient civilizations—Egyptian, Indian, Japanese among them—believed that the world itself had been hatched from an egg made by the Creator. The egg was also a symbol of rebirth. Giving Easter eggs has been a spring custom in many countries for centuries, linking pagan ideas of the rebirth of nature after the dead winter, with the Christian belief in the resurrection. 

The egg has a life of its own—breathing, excreting, growing and even communicating. For an animal to continue its lineage it must produce eggs that are not only adapted to their own environment, but must also be laid in sufficient numbers to survive in a hostile world. And survival is the essence of the story, if a species is to renew itself generation after generation.

An egg is the link between life and death. On another dimension a ‘ salagrama’  captures the spiritual imagination: Universe born out of nothingness, and all life originating from eggs, and the egg guaranteeing perpetuation of life, and thus, eternity. Nothingness (0) and eternity (∞) are inseparable twins, two sides of the same coin. Death renews life, and life apparently, on the visible surface, ends with death. But, life and death are inseparable mirror-images woven by the god’s loom. 

In science, there is no convincing answer to the old riddle: chicken first or the egg first. They are alternating stages in the never-ending progress of life. We will attempt to resolve this riddle by the logic of tangled hierarchies. With the thousands of spiritual experiences bestowed on us by SRI RAM ‘SIR’, surely there is a correct and exact answer to this riddle.
 
Egg is a miracle. Egg becoming a chicken is a much more profound miracle.

The Outline of Lecture:

In this lecture on the egg, these topics will be covered: (1) Anatomy of the egg, (2) Variety of eggs, (3) The science of egg-to-embryo, (4) Nests, the search for security, (5) Factor of safety in the continuity of life, (6) Hatching into a wider world and parental care, and (7) The riddle of “egg first or the chicken first.”