Featured in the newest Dialogue Magazine »
The Miracle of the Egg

The Miracle of the Egg

Introductory

A chicken egg appears to be a simple structure consisting of a hard shell enclosing the egg white with a yellow yolk at the centre. In fact, it is an exceedingly complex structure described as a “miracle of engineering.” Other accolades for the egg include “Nature’s Perfect Package” (1) and “Life’s Perfect Invention…  nature’s most perfect life support system.” (2) David Attenborough in his documentary revealed the wonder behind what he calls these “incredible miracles of nature.”

Avian eggs exist in many sizes, colors and variegated patterns. The smallest egg is that of the bee hummingbird egg, measuring about the size of a coffee bean and half the weight of a standard paper clip. The largest bird egg is that of the ostrich. They are on average 15 cm (5.9 in.) long, 13 cm (5.1 in.) wide, and weigh 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lbs.), which is over 20 times greater than the weight of a chicken egg. The egg is designed to protect its fetus in almost every environment, from the poles, where the temperature can reach 50 degrees below zero, to the tropics. (3)

One element crucial to every egg embryo is warmth. Thus, one parent must sit on the egg to ensure that it stays warm enough to thrive. Yet, although the ovoid package comes in different sizes and colors from white to black and almost every color in-between, the basic design is very similar.

The Eggshell
The bird’s eggshell is a remarkable piece of engineering. Although very thin, eggshells are extremely strong; harder than some metals. Eggshells are strong enough to withstand the full weight of an incubating parent. (4) Chicken eggshells must also be strong enough to resist being fractured from the outside, but weak enough to be broken from the inside when the chick is ready to hatch. How this design is engineered is nothing short of ingenious. (5)

One source of the shell’s strength is osteopontin protein that is embedded inside the eggshell’s crystal structure. Osteopontin forms a scaffold that guides the calcium-containing mineral assembly arrangement, generating the nanostructure that helps to produce the eggshell layer’s hardness. The outside of the shell has the smallest nanostructure, thus is harder and, as we move inwards, the shell becomes softer. The design requires a balance between strength and fragility in order to allow the chick to break out of the egg. This design was described by one research team as an eggshell that

“has an unusual combination of mechanical properties (low fracture toughness combined with high Young’s modulus), making it ideally suited as a container for the developing chick, which must be stiff and rigid but also brittle enough to be broken when required.” (6) 

The eggshell not only protects the chick developing inside, but it acts as a semipermeable membrane that allows air and moisture to pass through about 7,000 pores in a controlled fashion. This allows the chick inside to breathe, while protecting it from drying out from loss of water. As time progresses, the nanostructure of the outermost of the three eggshell layers remains unchanged, but the inner layer nanostructure becomes smaller in size. This is a result of calcium carbonate in the eggshell being dissolved in the acidic conditions of the egg white. The calcium carbonate is then used in the developing chick’s skeleton.

The Egg Parts Inside the Shell
The germinal disc is a small white spot on the yolk where the egg can be fertilized. If the germinal disc is fertilized, an embryo begins to grow, called a blastoderm. The yolk sac supplies food to the embryo, including minerals, vitamins, fat, and protein. The amnion is a transparent sac filled with a colorless fluid that serves as a protective cushion during embryonic development. Lying between the eggshell and egg white are two transparent protein membranes that provide an efficient defense against bacterial invasion. These surprisingly strong layers are constructed partly of keratin, the same protein used in human hair.

The chorion membrane surrounding the developing fetus provides nourishment and protection for the developing embryo. The allantois is a hollow sac-like structure that is critical to help the embryo exchange gasses and handle liquid wastes. The chalazae are strands of rope-shaped egg white that anchor the yolk in the egg’s center. They attach to the clear tissue that encloses the yolk, called the vitelline membrane, to the membrane lining of the eggshell.

No Evidence for Egg Evolution
Evolution of eggs would have required the chance development of the many fetal membranes in the egg including the yolk sac, amnion, chorion, and allantois. (7) All of these parts must exist in their entirety simultaneously and be functionally integrated. In other words, shelled-eggs are irreducibly complex. Even evolutionists have been forced to admit that eggs are wonderfully designed, but evolutionists believe that they were ‘designed’ by evolution: “we should be making materials that are inspired by nature and by biology because … it is really hard to beat hundreds of millions of years of evolution in perfecting something.” (8) Attenborough adds that the egg’s creator was not God, but natural selection: “By creating an egg, natural selection devised the perfect life-support system.” (9)

Eggs would have been critical (in an evolutionary mindset) to the transition from an aquatic to a terrestrial environment, yet evolutionists have been unable to even produce plausible speculations about their evolution. From an evolutionary standpoint, one “of the most important steps in the evolution of vertebrates was the ‘invention’ of the amniote egg… its appearance marks the beginnings of the history of the reptiles and the… evolution of the great groups that are dominant today, the birds and mammals.” (10) 

Scientists have long taught that the first terrestrial animals must have laid shell-less eggs which eventually evolved into eggshell-enclosed eggs in order to conquer living on dry land. How this occurred is an overwhelmingly unsolvable problem for evolution. (11)  Evolving eggs without shells, that were fertilized in water, into eggs that are fertilized when in the mother’s body, requires hundreds of structural changes. The leading manual dealing with eggs often opined about bird and egg evolution in the introduction, but mentioned not a word about when, where, or why their evolution happened. (12)

The fossil record contains no evidence of the evolution of eggshells. The record shows either eggs with eggshells or those completely lacking in eggshells. Nothing in-between has ever been found: “the paucity of the fossil record and the lack of intermediate eggshell types challenge efforts to homogenize eggshell structures…”  (13) This is true even though eggshells are preserved comparatively well in the fossil record. Although no evidence exists that eggshells evolved even once, nonetheless evolutionists have concluded that eggshells evolved separately three independent times. (14)

The basis for this conclusion is because the “calcitic eggshell consists of one or more ultrastructural layers that differ markedly among the three major dinosaur clades, as do the configurations of respiratory pores.” (15)  Instead of proposing that one type of eggshell evolved into the other types, the differences are so great that three separate evolutionary paths were proposed. In summary, eggs are another example of the major evidence against evolution and a major support for the fact of irreducible complexity in biological systems. They are “a true biological masterpiece, and at the same time, a puzzle” to evolutionists. (16)

  1.  Burton, Robert. Eggs: Nature’s Perfect Package. Facts on File. New York, New York, 1987.
  2. Attenborough, David (narrator). “The Egg: Life’s Perfect Invention.” PBS Nature video, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-egg-lifes-perfect-invention-about/17191/. 10 April 2019.
  3. Hauber, Mark. The Book of Eggs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992.
  4. Robinson, Phil. “An eggcelent design. Eggshell nanostructure shows purposeful construction.” Creation 40 (4): 24-26, October 2018.
  5. Amery, Heather. The Natural World. Golden Books. New York. New York, p. 30 1994.
  6. Taylor, Gordon Rattray. The Great Evolution Mystery. Harper & Row, New York, New York, 1983.
  7. Bergman, Jerry. “The egg––Irreducible complexity of creation’s perfect package.” Journal of Creation 33(1):119-124, 2019.
  8. Davis, Nicola. “Scientists solve eggshell mystery of how chicks hatch.” theguardian.com. 30 March 2018.
  9. Attenborough, David. “Attenborough’s Wonder of Eggs;”   https://www.mikebirkhead.com/AttenboroughsWonderOfEggs.html   2012
  10. Romer, Alfred. “Origin of the amniotic egg.” The Scientific Monthly 85(2):57-63, p. 57, August 1957.
  11. Bergman, Jerry. “The egg: Creation’s Perfect Package.” Creation Science Dialogue 39(1): 4-5, 12 January 2012.
  12. Hauber, 1992 p. 8.
  13. Norell, Mark et al. “The first dinosaur egg was soft.” Nature 583: 406-410. June 17, 2020.
  14. Norell, et al. 2020.
  15. Norell, et al. 2020, p. 406.
  16. Hauber, 1992 pp. 8-11.

Jerry Bergman
January 2025

Subscribe to Dialogue