what came first the chicken or the egg?

Answer 1

The egg came before the chicken

Answer 2

found this on the cnn website.. pretty interesting.




LONDON, England -- It's a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.

The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, he said.

"Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg," he added. "So, I would conclude that the egg came first."

The same conclusion was reached by his fellow "eggsperts" Professor David Papineau, of King's College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns.

Mr Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens.

He told PA people were mistaken if they argued that the mutant egg belonged to the "non-chicken" bird parents.

"I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it," he said.

"If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."

Bourns, chairman of trade body Great British Chicken, said he was also firmly in the pro-egg camp.

He said: "Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived. Of course, they may not have been chicken eggs as we see them today, but they were eggs

Answer 3

Which came first - the chicken or the egg? "The chicken" came first - in the sentence of the question. If the question is phrased differently, the answer is different.
Reframing the question

It could be said that the question simply requires one to know the context. Most people thinking of the question automatically think of the timeline and it is in this manner that both the previous evolutionary theory and religious teachings contexts arise. Other potential contexts are:

* Having looked through a dictionary from front to back, which came first? - the chicken or the egg?
* When you walked through the supermarket, which came first? - the chicken or the egg?
* When reading the menu, which came first? - the chicken or the egg?

Answer 4

The egg. Eggs were around millions of years before chickens, unless you are a creationist.
If you meant which came first the chicken or the chicken egg, that depends on whether you define a chicken egg as the egg from which a chicken hatches or the egg which was laid by a chicken.
The first chicken hatched from an egg which was laid by something which was not quite a chicken.

Answer 5

The egg. Without the egg there's no chicken. All the evolution takes place before the egg is laid. What's inside the egg is what will go out. So the egg was born before the chicken...

Answer 6

The chicken.

If the egg came first, how would it have become a chicken? You need a chicken to incubate the egg. No chicken, no egg hatching.

Answer 7

Egg definitely.Even Dinosaurs layed eggs. But Chicken came far later than dinosaurs.

Answer 8

God created the chicken, so chicken came first and layed the egg

Answer 9

The egg

Answer 10

Scientists have now agreed that it had to be the egg as the chicken evolved from one of the smaller species of dinosaur. No really its true. The only place that kind of genetic mutation can happen is in the embryo stage, hence it must have happened in the egg.