British scientists who clearly have nothing better to do, have apparently solved the age-old riddle which constantly plagues humanity – which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The scientists claim that the chicken came first because a protein necessary for the creation of an egg is only found in the chicken’s ovaries. Bam. Mystery solved.
Scientists knew about this specific protein already, which speeds up the development of the shell, but have just discovered how much it actually controls the production of the egg.
“It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,” said Dr. Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University’s Department of Engineering Materials, according to the Daily Mail.
I still don’t really get how the chicken was able to come first if it didn’t hatch from an egg, but that’s probably just because I nearly failed biology in college. Either way, I’m glad to know that I can go back to listening to Justin Bieber on repeat and breathe easy knowing this mystery has finally been solved.
via msnbc
This is nonsense. Unless the chicken was literally the first egg-laying bird-like animal, then it obviously evolved from another egg-laying bird-like animal (let’s call it Species A).
At some point Species A had an offspring via egg that started the evolutionary line towards chickens. Therefore the eventually evolved “chicken” did indeed come from an egg.
In fact we can be more specific. Birds probably evolved from raptor dinosaurs. Dinosaurs laid eggs. As it happens, all subsequent bird species laid eggs. Therefore, the chicken’s immediate evolutionary predecessor obviously laid eggs, meaning the first thing that could be called a chicken came from an egg.
Booya! Take that scientists! I pwn you!
Sure, but that mutie chicken came from a dinosaur egg, not a chicken egg.
Blabby’s is the view I usually take. In a pedantic sense, there were eggs before there were birds, so that’s the end of that question.
HOWEVER! I think the question they are asking is “which came first, the chicken as it appears now or the chicken egg as it appears now.” What I think they’re saying is that at some point in the distant past, there was a thing that has the characteristics of a chicken (round, feathery, prone to clucking) that did not lay eggs that have the characteristics of modern chicken eggs (oval, hard, prone to frying).
The eggs from this prehistoric chicken-thing were probably smaller and leathery, like lizard eggs. Then at some point, a virus or other genetic pot-stirrer introduced the machinery for this particular protein, which hardened the shell of the egg (thus providing the structure for a larger, lighter egg, which, if you are a chicken-thing, is a big bonus) and POOF! (and a million years or whatever) we have regular chickeny looking eggs.
That both the leathery, chicken-thing eggs and regular chicken eggs both produce chickens eventually is irrelevant, since the way the question is framed, we are talking about characteristics of the egg itself, and not the characteristics of what comes out of it. Although the scientists involved probably need to get out more.
Actually if the question were which came first, the bird or the egg, Atomic, you would probably be right, but it seems pretty reasonable to assume chickens evolved from other earlier bird forms which likely laid hard shelled eggs much the same way every type of modern bird does. I think I’ll have to go with Blabby on this one.