Chicken or the egg

[Radojica]

Which came first, chicken that can't come without the egg, or the egg that can't come without chicken?

Discuss

[Beorn]

Whichever one was excited the most, I suppose.

[Äike]

Some bird laid some eggs which had a new mutation, those mutated eggs turned into chickens.

The first chicken came from an egg, thus the egg came first, but not from a chicken.

[Wyn]

Genesis 2:19
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air...

[Wulfhere]

Okay, the normal answer to this question is the egg, since they existed millions of years before chickens. But the way you've phrased it requires a different answer. Let me restate it: Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg? The answer, again, is the egg - though not by millions of years. The egg shares its DNA with the chicken that hatches from it, and if we assume - as we must - that at some point in the past a specific genetic mutation produced what we arbitrarily class as a chicken, then that mutation is shared by the egg - even if that egg was laid by a creature that wasn't actually a chicken (but rather some very closely related but now extinct bird).

All such divisions between species are, of course, completely arbitrary, and evolution doesn't in fact work this way. But in theory at least it must have happened. Probably more than once, though in this case we simply choose the first time.

[Cail]

The egg. Because if draw a border between "already chicken" and "not yet chicken" between some two generations (and we have to do it to define "chicken"), the first "already chicken" egg would be laid by "not yet chicken".

[nisse]

The emergence of a new species is defined by when it can no longer reproduce with the species that gave rise to it. No single mutation could do this, so it doesn't make sense to talk about the chicken per se, but the evolution of egg laying as a reproductive strategy.

To lay an egg, you have to have evolved the entire reproductive system--> you are a sexually mature adult that reproduces by laying eggs (i.e. chicken). Since this is also something that wouldn't happen in one generation, we can take it back to its basics - reduce it down to the formation of gametes. Since the simplest organisms divide by giving rise to identical mother and daughter cells (i.e. adult-->2 adults, without the egg stage), the adult (i.e. chicken) would have come first.

[Murphy]

God came first.

[Vasconcelos]

The cell.

[Svanhild]

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