Chicken or the egg?

[UltimaLimit]

Well, what do you guys think? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I have my own solution to this, but I won't post it until later. I'm curious as to what you guys might have thought of.

[Ouch!]

The egg of course. Through evolution the first modern chicken's parents must have not been a modern chicken but something very, very similar. Therefore the egg came before the chicken.

[Craig]

You beat me to it, Ouch!

[Ouch!]

Wewt, I win!

[Rye]

What Ouch! said.

[Chris]

The Rooster!!

[Yamaneko]

The egg because they've been around longer than chickens.

[Skogs]

That depends how you define an 'egg'. If it's a hard-shelled, nutrient-containing incubator for a growning embryo, then the chicken came first, because there were 'organisms' before there were 'eggs'. However, if you define 'egg' as the oocyte which develops into a full-grown chicken, then the egg came first as the first organisms were, in fact, single cells.

[UltimaLimit]

EGG = what you crack and scramble for breakfast
CHICKEN = what you decapitate and turn into drumsticks

[Squall04]

EGG = what you crack and scramble for breakfast
CHICKEN = what you decapitate and turn into drumsticks

In that case it would most likely to be the chicken since it would be older. Unless the eggs you are eating for breakfast have been around for a long time.

[udsuna]

Are we asking whether or not the *CHICKEN* egg came before the chicken, or just eggs in general?
Because those very-close-to-chickens would have laid a very-close-to-chicken egg. Which would have held the chicken. Like in Jurassic Park, with the ostrich eggs and the lizards/mutant- type dinosaurs.

[UltimaLimit]

If it's other species' eggs, ignore it. But if it's a CHICKEN EGG, or a *chicken ancestor*'s egg, then we'll count it.

I'll post my solution on this tomorrow or Thursday. I should've made this a poll.

[udsuna]

So, if a *chicken ancestor's* egg counts, does that mean that the *chicken ancestor* also counts as a chicken?

[Skogs]

If you're thinking of *only* chicken eggs then I reason as follows:

The first chicken was born from an egg.
But the first egg wasn't laid by a chicken.

Thus, the egg came first.


But really I could argue either way until the cows come home.

[omnitarian]

EGG = what you crack and scramble for breakfast

Well, if we are to assume that only unfertilized chicken eggs count as eggs, then the chicken most certainly came first. [/wisearse]

Anyway, the flaw about defining "chicken" is that our defenition of what constitutes a chicken is purely subjective, at least in anagenesis (1 population changes enough over time to be considered a new species, instead of 2+ populations going off into distinct evolutionary branches).

Let's make a diagram! The further to your right, the more evolved you are.

Old Pheasant -- New Pheasant -- Old Junglefowl -- New Junglefowl -- Old Chicken -- New Chicken

Each intermediate species can breed with the intermediate species to its left, as well as the intermediate species to its right. New Junglefowl could breed with Old Junglefowl and Old Chickens. Based on the defenition of the word species (that is, 2 animals of different species can not produce fertile offspring), New Junglefowl can be considered the same species as chickens. They can breed with Old Chickens, so New Junglefowl and Old Chickens belong to the same species.

But they aren't the same species, because science mostly arbitrarily decides wether or not an animal has changed enough to warrant a new species. We certainly don't have a time machine to see who can breed with what and make a horribly complex chart detailing at what point New Pheastants couldn't breed with New Junglefowl. Speciation doesn't occur in one generation; it is a large change over time that doesn't suddenly determine if animal A can have babies with animal B.

Now I've completely lost track of what this has to do with the discussion at hand, so I'll back off now.