Chickens and Eggs

Green.

Chicken and egg.

The thing here is that green is the most comfortable colour for the human eye.

Now consider.

Leaves are green. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of shades of green.

It may be that green is also comfortable to animal’s and bird’s eyes, too; those that can see colour, that is. Their feelings on this matter are unknown to us given that we are told that animals understand every word we say (irrespective of the language used) but we do not, as yet, understand ‘woof!’

The fact of this matter is that the green in leaves is the colour of the chlorophyll within the leaves. It is this chlorophyll that enables the leaves to convert sunlight into something, chemically, usable to the plant.

Plants, like us, are living, breathing entities. They may well not be ‘sentient’ but they are alive in some form as opposed to, say, rocks. Rocks, in spite of what you may have seen on ‘Galaxy Quest’ are not alive.

Plants get their light from the sun. They are the root of all living things on the planet. Dead plants give us fossil fuel—along, no doubt, with a few dinosaur carcasses.

The bulk of the light coming from the sun is green and yellow.

Do we see an anomaly here?

Plants strive and struggle to get into the light and yet they reject the largest part of the light streaming down from the sun.

Why are plants not red or blue so that they use the green and yellow bounty from the sun.

Chicken and egg, you see.

Is ‘green’ comfortable to our eyes because leaves are green or are leaves green to make their colour comfortable to us?

How does Darwin fit that into his theories?

And then there’s life itself. Chickens and eggs.

At some point in the development of a chick inside an egg a spark lights up the process and the chick becomes alive.

We mammals have an umbilical cord that connects us with Mum pre-birth. Perhaps that should be ‘antenatal’ but I am not South African.

Living things (that ‘walk’ about the planet) all process food into energy that is combined with oxygen. This burning process drives our muscles so that our hearts beat and our lungs, if we have them, suck in air to provide the oxygen we need for the process.

It is that energy that enables us to feel surfaces, temperatures, emotion; taste food; smell flowers and to see and hear the world about us. A world that exists only within our own heads.

We are highly complex biological machines. Heat cycle machines that need fuel and oxygen to drive us, to keep us moving, thinking, feeling.

Where does the ‘spark’ come from that ignites this life? At what point is the ignition switch turned and we ‘power up’?

Maybe we get a kick from Mum along the cord.

Eggs?

One huge single-cell with one sperm cell in it starts reproducing. How? What tells it to do this? Where does it start? How does it start?

We don’t know.

Speaking of chickens and eggs there is another mystery that nobody has yet been able to solve for me.

It is this:

Some days, if you look up, you might see rooks nesting. At the top of trees. It is usually windy at the tops of trees.

In the hedgerows you will see smaller birds nesting. Breezes blow through even this sheltered environment.

Some birds are smart because they nest in holes. Holes in trees or cliffs or rocks. Perhaps they dig out these holes themselves but, sometimes, they will use any hole that appears in front of them.

Cuckoos are really smart. They neither build nests or feed their young. They leave all that up to others. Rather like having a maid.

Let’s go back to the nests.

How do they get that first stick, twig or piece of grass to stay there until they can get back with another piece?

Well?