An Irishman's Diary

Scientists are well-meaning, on the whole, but they never know where to stop. They're always coming up with "break- throughs" that, to the rest of mankind, just seem to go too far. What is a breakthrough for them is for us often something that robs life of yet another of the small mysteries that made it interesting, and in the process robs human beings of a little more of their dignity. So it is with the development, now apparently imminent, of self-timing eggs.

Yes, for centuries, mankind has struggled to produce a perfectly boiled egg. It's not so much a challenge if you like your egg hard, of course: you can always err on the side of caution. But for the many of us who prefer medium, 30 seconds either way can make all the difference. Thus, we have an in-built egg timer, a sort of sixth sense that has evolved in our ancestors over millennia, and tells us exactly when the egg is right. For some reason, mine only works at every third or fourth attempt.

But this just adds to the sense of triumph when it does.

Now, even the achievement of a boiled egg is to be taken from us. The technology we have to thank is something called thermochromatic ink, which is invisible at normal temperature but darkens when heated. Apparently the technique still needs tweaking.

But soon we will be able to buy egg cartons that, according to preference, are labelled "soft", "medium", or "hard". Each egg will have the word printed indelibly on its shell and when the letters become visible in the saucepan, you will know your egg is done to your taste.

Thermochromatic technology is not new to the kitchen. Certain baby spoons already come with an ingenious, temperature-related colour-change facility that allows you, if you're a really bad parent, to avoid testing the food in any of the traditional ways, such as by tasting it yourself. But no sane person actually trusts these spoons, whereas this egg thing has an insidious appeal that threatens to render natural timing redundant.

The self-timed egg is from the same general school of nannydom that gave us "best-before" and "use-by" dates. Once, we got all our food fresh: from the garden, or the farmer, or the food market. Maybe we even killed it ourselves. At any rate we had to decide how long it remained edible using only our five natural senses (plus the sixth sense, when it wasn't being used for egg-timing). Now nearly everything comes with a label that excuses us from this decision, and the effect is debilitating.

Even if milk looks and smells all right, it acquires a certain stigma once the date on the lid passes.

I know that use-by dates are dictated by important health considerations. But the combination of knowing there is a built-in safety margin, plus lingering guilt about the Famine, demand that we offer some resistance (an attitude that, we hope, will be matched by our digestive systems). Some of the skills developed over centuries to judge the edibility of food can equally be applied to the credibility of use-by dates. The contents are often grand, you'll find. It's just the label that smells off.

Still, in the area of poultry at least, there's no stopping the march of science. I must have missed it at the time but I see that, earlier this summer, even that ultimate question of timing - whether the chicken or the egg came first - was finally settled. In late May, a group of experts including a geneticist, a philosopher and a poultry farmer found conclusively in favour of the egg. And the fact that their deliberations were a publicity stunt for the film Chicken Little does not altogether diminish them.

The chicken/egg question has been around since ancient Greece. But the expert group had modern developments in biology to draw on. In summary, they agreed that since DNA does not change during an organism's life, the original chicken must have differed from its parents by some genetic detail, sufficient for the offspring to be the first bird to fulfil all the criteria for being a chicken. Therefore the organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would become, and thus was itself a member of the chicken species.

You're probably saying that this is a gross simplification, which has as much to do with semantics as with the principles of speciation. And you're right. Strictly speaking, neither the chicken nor the egg came first, because speciation does not occur in simple, easily defined units. As an article in Wikipedia puts it: "What qualifies as 'chicken' (ignoring the many diverse modern types of chicken) involves a wide range of genetic traits - aleles - that are not encompassed in a single individual and continue to be modified from generation to generation.

"The transition from non-chicken to chicken is a grey area in which several generations are involved, and which therefore includes many chicken-and-egg events, with no one step representing the whole."

I couldn't have put it better myself. But whether the chicken came first or second I predict that, by Christmas at the latest, science will finally explain why it crossed the road.