I think the egg came first because in order for the chicken to even exist and evolve to its current state, it would need to be first hatch only BY THEN it becomes the famous clucking bird we know and love.
Checkmate chicken-ists your move?
Eggs predate chickens. Chicken eggs evolved simultaneously with chickens. There was no first chicken, nor first chicken egg.
That’s not how evolution works. The chicken egg did come before the chicken, because that’s where mutations occur.
No, that is 100% not how evolution works. No individual has ever laid an egg of a different species. One mutation doesn’t make a non-chicken a chicken. Chickens evolved from their ancestors slowly over many many generations. It’s like how you can’t change one word and make a language a different language, but if you change enough words, it becomes a different language.
Let me put it another way. If you take a modern chicken back in time 50,000 years, it could probably breed with a chicken from then. But if you take it back maybe 100,000 years, maybe it can’t breed with a chicken from then. But if you take the chicken from 50kya, it could breed with the chicken from 100kya. So are they all the same species? Are they different species? Are they all chickens?
Humans like to put things in little boxes with clear delineations, but that’s not how nature works. Species don’t come to be from one mutation. They evolve as the accumulation of many many mutations over many many generations. There’s no point at which you can say that child is a different species than their parent.
I’m not saying some completely different bird laid an egg that contained a chicken. The change may be gradual, but the mutations still happen in the eggs. The first chicken or chickens were hatched, not transformed by radioactive goo.
And what I’m telling you is that there was no first chicken, just like there was no first Spanish speaker. Species don’t evolve that way.
Doesn’t the saying go ‘there’s a first for everything’?
Just because it’s a saying doesn’t mean it’s true for everything. Every child is the same species as its parent.
Sure, and since that means that there can be no new species unless they magically appear, there is only one species on this planet. Just very… varying
The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.
Modern chickens didn’t exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.
But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a ‘chicken’ laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.
The egg absolutely came first.
Ah, but is a chicken egg a chicken egg because it came out of a chicken or because a chicken comes out of it?
That is the real question.
This problem seems very similar to the impossibility of measuring a coastline accurately.
the chicken and the egg are laying in bed sharing a post-coital cigarette.
the chicken says, “Well I guess that answers that question.”
Every individual is different than their parents. We don’t see large scale changes from one species to another from a single generation, but from population changes over huge amounts of time.
Sometimes there’s a mutation that allows previous features to come back in an individual showing the history. Look up images of chickens with teeth.
Chickens as we know them now in a farm didn’t exist until we did our own evolutionary selection to change them to something that would have more meat on them by picking the preferred ones. Dogs are another very obvious demonstration of that. Dogs came from a now extinct ancestor of wolves, so you can carry the same fallacy, when did the wolf become a dog? It wasn’t the first ones that were lured in by a warm place and food, was it the second generation?
Evolution doesn’t have clear lines, humans just like to classify things. It’s a lot easier to do that with species separated by millions of years because the details have changed enough.
You have the correct answer, echoed by others. If one could draw a sharp line, then we would see proto-chickens laying eggs containing chickens and then some of those chickens laying eggs containing proto-chickens, back and forth for many generations. The combination of alleles that qualifies an organism as a chicken would arise and then often be reversed by recombination in the next generation. Eventually as more and more of the population has chicken allele combinations, the percentage of chickens born would grow as the reversals became less numerous than the forward conversions.
Now, what defines whether an egg is a proto-chicken egg or a chicken egg? An egg is formed by the action of maternal genes, so it will have the characteristics given to it by the proto-chicken mother. But if you just define an egg that hatches a chicken as a chicken egg (rather than an egg laid by a chicken), the egg always comes first.
nope its the ‘chicken’; in that the process of moving to an egg-encased zygote evolved after the organism that would become a chicken already existed.
Eggs in the morning, fried chicken for dinner so eggs come first. That was the question, right?
The egg came first. Mutations happen in the production of gametes, or sex cells, so a proto-chicken would have produced a slightly mutated egg that turned out to be a chicken.
I’ve always just answered with: “One day the egg that was laid hatched into a chicken.”
Accurate, but of course the real thing to note is in evolution, our lines and definitions of what a chicken is… is especially undefined. we just draw the line and call a particular creature a chicken… which is significantly more similar to the proto-chicken than a modern chicken is.
Dinosaurs laid eggs, and chickens did not come before dinosaurs. Eggs came first.
Its that simple
ah yeah quite true, if the question is egg’s in general, then yeah, eggs existed before the first land walking creatures. I always assumed the question is meaning a chicken egg specifically. Of which the answer is still the same as, as assuming we as humans pick an arbitrary line to draw for being a chicken. Obviously before the first chicken exists, a creature just short of meeting the qualifications for a chicken, would have layed an egg of what we define as a chicken, to create the first “chicken”.
I always struggled with the question until I thought about the question itself. Once I realized I was being asked: what came first? The answer became clear
The question is an illusion, there is no chicken
Another way to frame this is that, you can’t just magically create a singular being that’s a new species because it wouldn’t have anything to breed with. So it’s a long term gradual change of a complete population into what we know as a chicken today.
Every chicken is a dinosaur, but not all dinosaurs are chickens
Eggs existed for millions of years before chickens, why is this still a debate?
The chicken came first. Chicken-ness begins at conception.
Trust me, when it comes down to chickens, the chickens always come first.
Why? Because they are vicious little buggers, and if you try to make them wait they will eat you.
"Oh, hello monkey, is that a treat for me in your hand? How lovely, nom nom nom. What? I took your finger with the lovely dried bug? So sorry. Oh, hello monkey, is that an open wound in your hand for me? Nomnomnom. What? I’m not supposed to devour the flesh from your bones? So sorry. Oh, hello monkey, is that a bone sticking out from where your finger used to be…
You get the idea.
So, I can say with authority that if the egg had come first, the chicken would have eaten it.
According to Last-Thursdayism, both came at the same time - last Thursday, when the universe was created
egg was being used by a lot of lizards and sea life long before chickens came around
Define “chicken”
It’s a language question, not a biological one.
The answer is “depends on your definition of chicken and egg”.
“Chicken” isn’t a thing that exists in nature, it’s a category humans assign to some birds.are you drunk?
I mean… yes, but how could you tell?
drunk too
This is the correct answer.
That’s a statement not a question
Anyway, the hen came first which then traveled back in time to lay the egg first, so it then could hatch into the chicken.
