Egg Shape is No Accident
In these days of uniform food production, hens are sticking with an asymmetrical, tapered oval shape for good reasons. It certainly isn’t because they fit nicely into the container in your fridge!
Box shaped eggs will be very strong at the corners, but weak in the middle of the walls. And they’d be really tough to lay! Eggs are laid with the blunt end coming out first, followed by the tapered end. The tapered end has the ideal shape for the hen’s muscles to push on. You can imagine the difference if you think about squeezing a tapered cherry pit between your fingers and squirting it some distance, compared with trying to project a cube of sugar by squeezing it between your fingers.
Although a spherical shape is the strongest shape of all, completely round eggs would easily roll away down a hill and be lost. Eggs with the asymmetrical, tapered shape roll back to you if you nudge them, moving in a circle around a pointed end. It’s interesting that eggs of cliff dwelling birds are generally more oval than birds that nest on the ground. They roll in a very tight circle, and are less likely to roll off the cliff.
Another advantage of the egg shape is that eggs pack together nicely in the nest with only small air spaces between them. This means that more eggs fit into the nest and they help keep each other warm while hatching.
So next time you crack an egg, marvel at it’s ideal shape.
Perhaps it’s because of the busy pace of our lives, but most of us have the tendency to just accept that things are the way they are because they’re just that way. “That’s just the way it is.” is a common response to many questions. Somehow, deep in the past, the laws of probability, working within all the possible combinations and permutations produced a chance outcome and it happened to be “this” - whatever “this” might be under consideration at the moment.
Serious scientists are finding more and more evidence that “chance” isn’t the most satisfying answer for many of their questions about why things are the way they are. There really seems to have been some intelligent input behind it all. There seems to be clear purpose and design which are quite outside the realm of mere chance.
Some theorists now suggest that little or nothing is decided by chance. Their idea is that we just don’t understand all of the delicate balances that affect final outcomes of even things like coin tosses. The initial position of the coin on the thumb nail, the amount of force in the flip, the position of the hand, the shape and balance of the individual coin, the density and movement of the air, and other factors we don’t normally think of, let alone try to control, when we’re flipping coins all affect the outcome.
When we move into areas of greater complexity, like the shape of eggs, we find chance to be even less satisfying. When we take a closer look, the things that we might be tempted to describe as “natural” have been carefully designed and created.
When we look at nature, we observe order and beauty. When we look at order and beauty, we observe intelligence. Chaos produces more chaos. Only order can produce order. Order can (and does) degenerate into disorder. There are lots of examples of this. But we can’t think of any examples of disorder “degenerating” into order.
The evidence for intelligent design, indeed a divine mind, behind the natural world is strong. It is good to look at our motives for trying to write God out of the script. What is behind the drive to choose the god of chance over the God of purpose? Could it be that our own desire to live disorderly moral lives prompts us to try to avoid the God to whom we must give account?
David Humphreys and Ron Hughes
© August 2004
