   The Egg Came First
Chicken and egg debate unscrambledQuote:LONDON, England -- It's a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg....The debate, which may come as a relief to those with argumentative relatives, was organized by Disney to promote the release of the film "Chicken Little" on DVD.So what do you think? Problem solved or simply a case of junk science used for commercial promotion?    
  It's clear that some form of eggs existed before the chicken.  Now, if we're talking about chicken eggs specifically, it's also clear that the chicken is a product of evolution and that it went trough genetic modifications over the ages.  Therefore, in order to reach a conclusion on the matter, we have to decide wether the first non-flying bird born after the arbitrary point in time where we have decided that they have, in fact, officially became chicken was in a chicken-egg or an ancestor-egg.That places me firmly in the "Who cares ?" camp.   ;  The egg pre-dates the chicken by quite some time. Fish laid eggs in the sea and some of them moved onto land (returning to water to lay their eggs). Eventually they developed the ability to lay eggs with shells and thus freed themselves from the need to return to the sea to breed. Only later did these egg laying creatures evolve into egg laying dinosaurs, feathered dinosaurs, then into birds and finally into Chicken McNuggets.   ;Quote:Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.Isn't that, well, painfully obvious?  I'm pretty sure I came to that conclusion when I was about seven.   ;  Pretty useless because chickens didn't evolve in a sudden way, it's a slow process involving many, many egg generations.And by the way, aren't chickens domestic animals created by human selection of some wild bird type?   ;  It's easy. It depends on your definition of "chicken egg". If you define a chicken egg as "an egg laid by a chicken" then the chicken came first. If you define chicken egg as "an egg from which a chicken can hatch" then the egg came first.So, define chicken egg!   ;  Which came first, the pseudo-philosopher or the argument over semantics?   ;Quote:Original post by SanderSo, define chicken egg!While you're at it, define chicken...;  The question is faulty.If a "chicken egg" is "an egg laid by a chicken", then the chicken came first since the egg it hatched from wasn't laid by a chicken.If a "chicken egg" is "an egg containing a chicken", then the egg came first since the animal which laid it wasn't a chicken.Further, the question assumes there is a clear line between chicken and protochicken, which is not the case. Even with a time machine, we couldn't point at a particular animal and say "that was the first chicken": "chickeness" is the product of many independent mutations. At any point, the population of protochicken would consist of members with different sets of mutations.Whilst there'd be several protochickens who were "50% chicken"; it would be a different 50% of features. Even if we imagine there'd eventually be a "100% chicken" animal, it'd be the offspring of "99% chicken" parents and there'd likely be a number of other "100% chicken" chicks in the same generation, so none of then could reasonably claim priority.The above assumes "100% chicken" is meaningful. But unless all chickens were clones they'd always have genetic differences, so we can't draw the line of chickeness at the point where the animal's genes are 100% chicken. Instead the chicken must be defined statistically. We might say an animal is a chicken if it shares more of its DNA with the "archetypal chicken" than with any other species. This would be subject to much debate as to what weighting to give to which genes, since not all genes have an equal effect on the phenotype, and what the "archetypal chicken" should be defined as.And that is only considering genetic indicators of species. If we were to bring in other methods of determining species, then the issue would get a whole lot more fuzzy.If you're after a simple "pop science" answer, though, my vote is for "the egg".   ;  To me, it is quite obvious that the chicken came first.   