The Egg

"As I stare at the eggs before me, I try to perceive the potential that is contained within each one. It strikes me that an egg is a most remarkable phenomenon, so commonplace, so famliar, and yet sublime. Pleasing to look at and sensual to hold, it is one of those perfect creations of nature that is disarmingly simple from one point of view and staggeringly complex from another. Even the chicken egg, refrigerated and sterile, reminds us of something precious as we cradle it carefuly in our hands.
     A living egg, with its warmth, its purity, and its sleeping potential, is a wonder. Who has not had the experience of peering down on the nest of a bird and being shocked by the sight of this uncanny perfection contrasted with the rough fabric of the nest?
     An egg is a mechanical device used to transport and protect a living embryo. It is an architectural exercise in the conservation of space and in structural integrity. It is a vehicle for traveling down the fallopian tube and eventually out into the cold hard world, and a vehicle for traversing time - a time machine that can reconcile twenty million years in only twenty-eight days.
     There is a wonderful principle in evolutionary biology known as Haeckel's biogenetic law that is stated simply: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, every oganism must retrace its evolutionary development from a one-celled organism to its contemporary manifestation as it develops from fertilization to birth. Although an oversimplification, this concept has valid applications. As an embryo develops, it begins with simple mitosis - one cell dividing into two. There is then a predictable progression through stages, each of which represents a rung on the phylogenetic ladder. A fetal pig will pass through successive developmental stages whereby it will share features with and be scarcely discernible from the fish, the amphibian, the reptile, up the evolutionary path to a stage representing its primitive mammalian ancestry. Only then will it begin to find its particular biological identity as a pig. Up to that point it is bound to revisit each ancestral stage of its development.
     This principle, of course, holds us biologically accountable, as well. Evolutionary development is a process of building on existing attributes, not of starting from scratch. Every structure in our body from our skeleton to our DNA serves as testimony to this principle. We are a walking paleontological repository. This is why the skeleton of a frog laid next to that of a man, with the exception of size is bone for bone very much the same - a quantitative difference only. We are a frog run amock. We have to biologically retrace our steps through antiquity every time one of us is conceived."

Joe Hutto, 1995

Illumination in the Flatwoods

Drawing by Joe Hutto