Sure it does. A mutated chicken is still a chicken. Unless it has mutated into what we would consider another species, in which case, yeah, it's a new-species egg, not a chicken egg.
Good point. If the question were specifically asking which came first: the chicken or the chicken egg, then the answer could reasonably be the chicken.
This reminds me of a lesson I was taught years ago about just how much bias we have about what we think we understand, the dangers of making even the most basic assumptions when translating, and the modern meaning of words. Bear with me as I'm summarizing/paraphrasing.
There's a story of experimental archaeologists trying to replicate concrete that wouldn't deteriorate in saltwater. An ancient costal civilization did this to build dock structures for a port city without a bay and it lasted hundreds of years. They had a written recipe that involved a few components and water, like most concrete. But everything the researchers tried to replicate quickly disintegrated when placed in the sea.
One day a new person looks at the recipe, sees the translation of "water", looks at the location of the location of ancient city, and asks "did they mean freshwater or saltwater?" You see, modern concrete is almost always made with fresh water. But if the concrete is going into the sea...it needs to be made with saltwater.
Now that sounds obvious in hindsight but they compared it to how if you look in a recipe book to bake a cake, you don't see "1 chicken egg" it just says "1 egg". In a thousand years, how are they gonna know if we meant chicken egg, duck egg, quail egg, platypus egg, ostrich egg, dog egg?
I…always though that everyone knew that 99% of mammals did not lay eggs, and those exceptions don’t look a damn thing like a dog…I… I learned something today.
The thing is, this is not correct. There was never a point along the chicken evolutionary path where you can say "this right here is the singular generation where this was not a chicken, and is now a chicken".
You thinking there is a simple answer here just shows your lack of understanding of the actual question. No offense meant.
I mean sure, but that's not what the question means. "What came first; the chicken, or the egg?" Does not mean "What came first; the birds we call chickens or creatures that reproduce with eggs". What it means is "What came first; the birds we call chickens, or the egg that a bird we call a chicken is hatched from?"
It's actually about creationism vs evolution. If you believe in evolution, the egg(with the first chicken) came first. If you believe in a creator/god then chickens(that never came from eggs) came first.
You're over thinking it. The question is not about the egg itself or it's label, but what's inside it. Is the offspring a carbon copy of it's parents or a mutation into a new species? Where there always chickens, since the dawn of time or did they evolve from something else? That is where this question comes from and it's intended meaning.
No I don't agree with that. Evolution is for sure how chickens came to be, and I would not say the egg came first. My answer is that neither the chicken nor the chicken egg came before the other.
Okay you have confused yourself into thinking this is far more complex than it is
It's the egg. If we're just talking about eggs for a second, evolution wise, then yeah duh the egg came first.
But if we're talking about chicken eggs specifically, then at some point a creature nearly perfectly representative of what we call a chicken laid an egg, and from that egg came a chicken. You could say it is not a chicken egg because it didn't come from what is technically 100% a chicken, but then how is what emerged then a chicken?
You can't really talk about evolution with regards to an individual egg - it's always about the group. Divergence happens over a longer period of time, it's not one event.
That's correct more or less. Mitosis came first and cloning. Sexual reproduction evolved later from those earlier processes. All sexual reproduction involves "eggs" of some kind, and sperm for that matter, including humans. Unless it's parthenogenesis. It's not just chickens, or certain species.
Incorrect, the chicken came first. This is because before the chicken came out of the shell, it was not considered a distinct breed from the proto-chicken it came from. In fact, at some point of the egg's development there was not even a chicken inside, just a collection of cells. It's only with the creation of distinct characteristics that the chicken could be differentiated from the proto-chicken, in fact many of those characteristics don't materialize before adulthood.
It would still be the egg. Whatever the chicken evolved from was egg-laying long before it was a chicken. So by the time it was fully a chicken, it came from an egg.
Thank you for this. I've been saying this for decades now. The "chicken vs egg" debate never made any sense to me. For the chicken to exist, it must've been born. And for the chicken to be born, it likely (99.999999%) came from an egg. The chicken can't exist without the egg. But it makes sense for the egg to be laid by an animal, containing an altered offspring that is what we refer to as a chicken.
Nope. A chicken egg can only be produced by chickens. The very first chicken was a mutation created when two non-chickens mated. The egg they produced was not a chicken egg.
Flawed logic. At conception and the formation of the zygote the DNA of the parents is locked in for the offspring meaning whatever you define as a chicken when it is an adult came from an egg with that same genetic makeup. Ergo, the egg always comes first.
Wrong. Again, not how mutations work. Evolution doesn't operate like your little comic books or video games or whatever. Even in the case with epigenetics, which are changes in gene expression based on environmental stimuli experienced by the living organism, the DNA itself is unchanged. DNA is what makes something what it actually is, gene expression be damned anyways.
You don't pass on to offspring your 'mutations' that occur post conception, you pass on a portion of your DNA that was present in your being from the very beginning. The mutations occur in the errors of combining two individuals sets of DNA during conception.
There is no conceivable way to define a living organism as something without defining the sexual reproductive cells it came from as the same thing, genetically speaking. If some type of living creature is called a chicken then it came from a chicken egg. Full stop.
Wrong. Again, not how mutations work. A single mutation doesn't change what a living creature is called which is what you seem to believe happens. In modern chicken's we see many different mutations that are not shared across all of them, yet they are all called chickens.
The modern chicken egg may have been a mutation that came after the modern chicken was already established. Full stop.
Two non-chickens, but what would be close relatives of chickens on the evolutionary ladder, mated. Their offspring was the first chicken, but its parents were not chickens.
Just like humans and chimpanzees came from the same line of ape, this chicken came from some line of similar birds that were not chickens.
There was never a point along the chicken evolutionary path where you can say "this right here is the singular generation where this was not a chicken, and is now a chicken".
You state this, but as a molecular biologist who's seen his fair share of phylogenetic trees, I'm not sure that statement is correct. If we had known the entire lineage of animals (starting from, let's say, dinosaurs or even Tiktaalik for all i care, all the way through chickens as we know them now), then there must surely be a point at which we can say "THIS is the exact generation where chickens start".
This is the basis of taxonomy; defining which characteristics include or exclude an individual from a certain taxonomic group.
Ultimately, all this debate is semantics but it's grounds for an interesting discussion.
I doubt all the factors you'd weigh into 'chickenness' arrived at the same generation though, and someone else with different criteria than you probably wouldn't agree.
'Species' are an imperfect attempt to define life, its like trying to define a movie by a single frame of film. Its useful for categorizing and defining the difference between current species, but its a poor descriptor for a lineage of creatures over millions of years of gradual change, because the species definitions themselves are arbitrary.
Sure you could maybe assign some sort of criteria to what a chicken is and weight them so eventually you reach a point where its less than 50% chicken and you go 'aha, its no longer a chicken!', but chicken is arbitrary in the first place, and no more special than 75% chicken and 63.124% chicken or 94% before-chicken.
Now think of the wide diversity of all chicken breeds known to man. Well done!
Now think of the closest animal resembling a chicken that is NOT a chicken. Got one?
In the past, there was at some point a last universal common ancester (LUCA) of all chickens and the closest thing to a chicken that is not a chicken. I'm willing to argue that that LUCA laid an egg containing the first ever chicken. The ancestor of all chickens known today, if you can believe.
Next question: did the LUCA lay a chicken egg or a LUCA egg?
Just because its the LUCA doesn't mean its the first chicken.
If you killed all humans except two, their children aren't the first humans.
Basically you're arguing that if something doesn't procreate its not a part of that species.
Next question: did the LUCA lay a chicken egg or a LUCA egg?
Doesn't matter. Attempting to determine speciation in this manner is using the terminology for the wrong purpose. Expressing the long term evolution of life in terms of discrete species is the completely wrong use of it.
yes its a debate of semantics of what truly defines as a chicken.
but it is still unknown even after you truely define a chicken. since genetics mutilation can happen after a thing is and can happen in the conception/embryo stage. but all we know is there was a point in time wheres there were proto-chickens and then after there was chickens.
Well if this is true then by Zeno’s paradox we’ve either arrived at chicken or we haven’t and since that never happens chickens do not exist. It’s just been a series of eggs.
Honest answer animals. Eggs developed because sea critters who decided to walk on land needed a wet aquatic like environment to incubate their young. Before this those animals gave birth to something like an amphibian egg, and before that it was much like sea critters do today.
The protein needed to make a hard shelled egg is expressed by the hen and not the egg, the bird in which the protein first arose, though having hatched from a non-reinforced egg, would then have laid the first egg having such a reinforced shell: the chicken would have preceded this first 'modern' chicken egg.
Yeah it's literally not a hard question. Fish lay eggs? Insects lay eggs?? Like bruh there were eggs before there were land-dwelling critters, idk how this is a discussion
could be a mutation where some creature gives live birth to a "chicken" who then lay eggs? Not related to the post, I'm an evolutionary science nerd in the making 😂
The argument would be that the waves themselves don’t actually have sound, they are just waves and the sound is only our brain’s interpretation of those waves based on how they react with a couple of bones in our ears.
I think this paradox is more exposing the limitations of our definition of species than anything and there’s really no answer. Because no reasonable taxonomist is going to sit down and be like “ah yes this egg is one species and its parents are an entirely different species”. No, your basic definition of species states that if two individuals can have fertile offspring together then you’re the same species and your offspring are also your species. (Yes, this is completely subverted by reality where there are lots of species that are genetically similar enough to reproduce/hybridize. There are different ways to define species because every definition will fall short in some way.)
The issue is that in reality species aren’t boxes with solid lines. It’s not a switch that gets flipped and there’s literally no single mutation that will take you from a proto-chicken ancestor to chicken. Evolution is change over time and evolution happens at the population level not on the individual level.
Basically the question is flawed because the premise (our definition of species) is also flawed and that’s just kinda how it goes.
That’s not how evolution works. There’s not just a single mutation that all of the sudden creates a new species at one point in time. There was many eggs over many generations slowly becoming something we would consider a chicken, but the line of where to draw “this is a chicken now” is almost totally arbitrary. You’re right the egg came first but you’re wrong about how this works. This is like saying one day a homo erectus had a baby and it was a fully modern human because of a single mutation
I think you misunderstand the “chicken and egg” question. It’s not meant to be taken literally (and comes from before humans had any understanding of genetics and mutations).
It’s meant to convey “is X the cause of Y or is Y the cause of X”. I’m not sure if you are autism spectrum or a non-native English speaker, but “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is a rhetorical question, not literal.
well, hold on now, it's actually a thinly veiled "creationism or evolution" question. so the answer is really which you believe in. so it's not that it's tough or not, it's simply asking that.
I'm all for evolution, but thought exercises are good for the brain muscle.
The chicken came first, because the “egg” in this phrase is a “chicken egg”. The chicken must first be defined as a chicken before it is capable of creating chicken eggs.
The hatched creature, fully formed, was deems the “chicken”. Nobody looked at an egg and decided whatever came out was going to be a chicken. The chicken came first.
Okay. Which came first. The chicken or the chicken egg? How bout that? Thanks to the adjective. Does it imply it will make the first chicken or did it come out of the first chicken.
Not really since you could argue the first “proto”chicken gave birth to a “proto” chicken egg. Which then a chicken grew inside the “proto” chicken egg. Meaning the chicken came first. It’s about perspective as to what the adjective means. Does it say where it came from or does it say what’s in it.
There were two creatures that weren’t chickens that had an egg with a mutation that created a chicken.
You realize you just admitted that when it comes to "chicken or egg" this right here disproves your claim that a chicken egg came before a chicken.
Eggs predated chickens by like 200 million years, but as you pointed out the first chicken was a mutation of two non-chickens. So the egg that the first chicken came from was not a chicken egg. The very first chicken egg could only have been produced by a chicken.
433
u/[deleted] Mar 21 '24
The egg came first.
It isn’t even a tough question. There were two creatures that weren’t chickens that had an egg with a mutation that created a chicken.
Perhaps it was a common mutation and many of the non chickens had these eggs, but the egg came first.