Keep It Simple

This photo, bound to elicit an "ah" from all who view it, was taken at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. I hope to spend a month there this fall, and in an effort to get to know the museum that I hope to room in, I am thinking and writing about it. This exhibit, the hatching of chicks, falls under the category of "oldie but goodie". It is an unassailable truism that it is entrancing to watch a chick emerge from it's shell. To watch the egg go from something that might grace your breakfast table, to developing a bit of a hole, to having a new life emerge, damp and tired from the effort, is magic, pure and simple. I loved it when I was five and I still love it when I am 50. I could spend hours--literally--watching it happen over and over again. Then once the chicks dry off and learn to stand up, the process of seeing them mill about and develop some personality is equally engaging. With the rise in popularity of raising chickens, in both urban and rural settings, the chicken is getting better PR. However, less than 2 million people in the U.S. live on farms and this exhibit may be the first time a young child will have seen an animal being born. What is common is also profound, and this exhibit is a winner.
Which begs the question, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, while the answer has been argued both ways, the latest installment is that while evolutionists lean toward the egg, there is some recent evidence that says maybe it is the chicken. Ovocledidin-17 is the protein that is found in the chicken's ovary and it allows her to change calcium carbonate into calcite and therefore make an egg that is hard to crack--scientists argued that the discovery of this in the chicken indicates that the chicken came first, followed by the egg. Debate continues. And this does nothing to answer the other age old question that inevitably arises after watching small cuddly chicks for hours on end--why did the chicken cross the road?