The chicken or the egg?

[Elijah John]

Which did come first, the chicken of the egg? According to scientific, evolutionary theory.

[wiploc]

Which did come first, the chicken of the egg? According to scientific, evolutionary theory.

The first chicken came out of an egg. So the egg was first.

It'll be arbitrary, drawing the line between the first chicken and the last predecessor of chickens, but if you want to identify the first chicken, you have to draw it anyway.

Now I suppose you could argue that it wasn't a chicken egg if a chicken didn't lay it, but, to my way of thinking, if a chicken hatched out of it, it was a chicken egg. If you agree with me on that, then the egg came first.

If you don't agree on that, then the egg still came first. It just wasn't a chicken egg.

[Elijah John]

Which did come first, the chicken of the egg? According to scientific, evolutionary theory.

The first chicken came out of an egg. So the egg was first.

It'll be arbitrary, drawing the line between the first chicken and the last predecessor of chickens, but if you want to identify the first chicken, you have to draw it anyway.

Now I suppose you could argue that it wasn't a chicken egg if a chicken didn't lay it, but, to my way of thinking, if a chicken hatched out of it, it was a chicken egg. If you agree with me on that, then the egg came first.

If you don't agree on that, then the egg still came first. It just wasn't a chicken egg.

I've heard that explanation before, and it makes some sense. If chickens evolved out of other egg-laying animals, where did the first egg laying animals come from? Presumably they too were born from eggs, but who laid those eggs?

[benchwarmer]

[Replying to post 3 by Elijah John]

Evolution is a continual process, thus the first problem in answering this is: What do you mean by 'egg'? The hard shelled things that come out of chickens? The first 'egg' was probably some sort of embryonic casing that does not resemble what we think of eggs today.

[Divine Insight]

I've heard that explanation before, and it makes some sense. If chickens evolved out of other egg-laying animals, where did the first egg laying animals come from? Presumably they too were born from eggs, but who laid those eggs?

You would need to take this clear back to the first multi-celled organisms. Let's assume that you have already accepted reproduction by cell division. Then to move up to the next stage you would have a multi-celled organism that reproduces by cell-division only of a specific primal cell. It doesn't reproduce by splitting all of its cells simultaneously.

So that would be the beginning of a primal "egg". Which is indeed a single cell by the way. Over time the multi-celled organisms simply evolved to become very specialized in how they shed this single cell for reproduction. And that would be how it all came about.

So the first "egg layer" wasn't truly an "egg layer" at all. It was simply a multi-celled organism that reproduced by shedding a single cell. That specialized single cell then eventually evolved to become a very sophisticated cell than today we call an "egg".

[bluethread]

The egg thing really doesn't show anything one way or the other. Humans are born from "eggs". It is just a thin membrane that separates the amniotic fluid from the uterine wall. Fish eggs are a little tougher, reptile eggs are leathery and avian eggs are hard. So, as was said earlier, based on evolutionary theory, the egg came first.

[William]

[Replying to post 1 by Elijah John]

An interesting thread discussion on this;

Which came first - the chicken or the egg?

[SkyChief]

Which did come first, the chicken of the egg? According to scientific, evolutionary theory.

It was neither a chicken nor an egg

It was a chegg. And God made it.

NEXT question?

[steveb1]

[Replying to post 1 by Elijah John]

Didn't the Big Bang come before all chickens and eggs? And are not cosmologists divided on the question of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang...?

[JoeyKnothead]

From the OP:

Which did come first, the chicken or the egg? According to scientific, evolutionary theory.

The fryin' pan, all lonely and all, a-wanderin' the alleys and the backwoods, up to here.

I propose though, as an amateur eggololigist, is that any 'new' species would have to be the offspring of any 'previous' species. It's in that offspring where the change/s occur.

As I grant that the term species can be it just as a befuddlement as the term kind.


Clades is where it's at in current eggolutionary thought.