I pass by the house in which James Lovelock conceived The Gaia Hypothesis every time I travel to Cork. Named after Gaia, the Greek supreme goddess of the Earth, this hypothesis proposes that the biosphere and the physical components of the earth are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and bio-geo-chemical conditions on earth in a preferred homoeostasis.

Many cultures trace their origins to an egg cosmogony. In the Greek orphic myth the world egg was laid by uncreated night imagined as a black winged bird.