Tabloids would pay millions for pictures of celebrity eggs.
Celebrities would probably lay Faberge eggs.
Except the boobs are just refined plumbing. I don’t see any reason boobs wouldn’t have evolved.
Humans could have much larger brains. So we’d either be smarter, or more tasty for zombies.
In theory, you could bring your egg to work with you, so you wouldn’t need to sit home with it.
However, if eggs that we consume are unfertilized ones, would a woman lay an unfertilized egg once a month?
Well, Helen of Troy was hatched from an egg. How did that work out?
OK- I just nominated this for threadspotting. Too funny!
You would be Dejah Thoris and I would claim my £5.
Or, the egg could be laid with a soft shell that only hardens after being laid. And the baby could be much more undeveloped, since it would still have life support after birth, making birth easier. Women might in fact have narrower hips for that reason.
I bet we’d have “egg safes”; armored and insulated boxes with electric heaters designed to protect the egg from everything from theft to fires to a building collapse.
Assuming that the eggs need to be kept warm, I expect the development of ever increasingly sophisticated methods of keeping them warm without a woman having to hug or sit on them. Apes would sit on their eggs; pre-industrial human societies would probably have some sort of small enclosed “egg house” with low burning coals, to provide a warm but not-too-hot temperature. Women would need to hang around and check the fire, but could do other things besides squatting on eggs all day. The invention of reliable artificial heat would be a major driver for women’s liberation.
That’s what I was thinking. Would we eat our unfertilized eggs (giant hard boiled eggs!) or view them with a bit of disgust, the same way some see a woman’s period?
I’d rather lay an egg than have my period, FWIW.
“Daddy, which came first: the human or the egg?”
“Well, son, I don’t think your mommy came at all! BOO-YA!!!”
Probably the latter, for the same reason cannibalism is rare; it’s a good way to get disease.
And I bet conservatives would bemoan the women who didn’t put fire-checking at the very top of their priorities. And we’d get glurge about the “good old days” when women sat on their eggs themselves without those newfangled egg houses.
Eventually there would be a saga thread on this board titled “We have human eggs”.
Breasts don’t make any difference in your ability to feed a baby, so we might still evolve them.
There are a couple major issues with human babies developing in eggs.
First, there’s only so much of a life support system you can fit in an egg of a given size. So you either have to lay very large eggs, or delay laying them until the fetus is mostly developed. This isn’t such a big deal for other egg-laying animals because their babies develop very quickly. Our long gestation period would be very problematic.
The other issue is that, if you’re going to have a hard-shelled egg, it has to be large enough to support the infant at birth. And given that fish have soft-shelled eggs but later animals don’t, there’s probably a good reason why soft-shells wouldn’t work for us. Ladies, if you think giving birth is bad now, imagine trying to squeeze out a rock hard object the size of a watermelon.
For the same reason that they didn’t evolve in the monotremes. It’s very misleading to describe platypi as “primitive” mammals (or, in fact, to describe any current species as “primitive”): They’ve been evolving for just as long as anyone else.
*>cough< * Platypus >cough<
Instead of cribs, parents would go shopping at Ikea to pick up a NÅEST for the wee ones, and when they get a bit older, back to the store for a KØØPP.