I eat a lot of eggs, which means that I cook a lot of eggs, which means that I break a lot of eggs.
This morning as I cracked an eggshell against the rim of my frying pan, I wondered how different the art of breaking eggs would be if eggs weren’t blessed with a membrane underneath the shell. According to Wikipedia, eggs actually have two membranes right inside the shell, but I can only see one with my naked eye – or even when my eyes are clothed in bifocals.
If there were no membrane, though, would the shell shatter on impact? That sometimes happens anyway, but I think it would be a much more frequent event if the shell fragments couldn’t cling to that inner skin. We’d probably have a whole kitchen utensil or appliance dedicated to the successful separation of egg from shell. Perhaps it would cut a cap off the shell rather than breaking it, or suck the egg out through a hole that it drilled, or dissolve the shell through some chemical process.
And what if the albumen wasn’t quite so viscous? As soon as you made a crack the thickness of a frying pan’s edge the egg white would come pouring out instead of nobly sticking to its breached fortress via the comradery of surface tension. You’d always have to crack the eggs in the desired container instead of on its side or on the countertop.
The egg also fits the palm of the human hand just right for the act of knocking it against something or throwing it at someone who particularly deserves it. You can even break open an egg with only one hand.
Obviously, God must have created the egg for human use.
What isn’t so obvious is that we humans have shaped the chicken egg ourselves through millennia of breeding chickens and selecting for those that produce eggs we like. We’ve also developed cooking practices that take advantage of an egg’s unique properties. Both the human and the egg have evolved together to create this efficient predator/prey relationship. We didn’t need the hand of a deity to shape the egg, or us.
Unless, of course, you think of said Divine Appendage as merely a poetic anthropomorphism for some guiding Force behind everything that happens, evolution included. Just remember that crediting it with a human-like capacity for intention is just as anthropomorphic as giving it four fingers and an opposable thumb.
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