What came first the chicken or the Egg? how does it play into Evolution?

Answer 1

From a cellular biology point of view this question can be answered quite easily. The egg came first because any female sex cell is called an egg.

If the egg is defined structurally as the hard shelled thing, and the chicken a feather covered animal, the answer is still simple. Evolutionary scientists believe the first hard shell egg was the amniotic egg laid around 300 million years ago, and was laid by the animal who was the link between amphibians and reptiles. One of the first dinosaurs that we know had feathers was the Archaeopteryx, and came much later. Modern birds would not arise until 150 million years ago, descending from theropod dinosaurs.

In this case, the first chicken must have been the mutated offspring of a proto-chicken that laid the egg containing the first true chicken. In any case, this creature hatched from a recognizable egg. After all, the question is purposefully ambiguous -- it is not, "Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?"

The crux of the matter is how to biologically define 'a chicken'. What level of genetic similarity or structural similarity determine whether an organism is a chicken? One can only define what was the first chicken after the fact, thus any definition of the first chicken becomes arbitrary. The question 'which came first?' ignores the complicated reality of speciation. The concept of species is an abstraction intended to categorize a broad swath of genomes and their subsequent phenomes. If one were to do away with approximate categories, each individual 'chicken' actually represents a unique genotype. Under this definition, if a 'chicken' possessing genome A were to lay an egg possessing genome B, then an egg of genome B is antecedent to an animal possessing genome B and that the parent--genome A--is antecedent to, yet different from the egg of genome B. Hence, in an absolute sense, the egg came before the 'chicken.'

According to the principles of speciation, neither the chicken nor the egg came first, because speciation does not occur in simple, obvious units. In fact, evolution is about a slow transition in an overall population. What qualifies as “chicken” (ignoring the many diverse modern types of chicken) involves a wide range of genetic traits (alleles) that are not encompassed in a single individual and continue to be modified from generation to generation.

The transition from non-chicken to chicken is a grey area in which several generations are involved, and therefore which includes many many chicken-and-egg events, with no one step representing the whole. Since the result of the process is an incomplete transition into various new characteristics rather than one single blueprint, a new species, "chicken", is only identified in hindsight when the species can be obviously identified as different from its ancestral stock.

Possibly, if life originated from an ooze or protozoa of some type, at first there may only have been cellular life that used division as a reproductive method but as multicellular creatures evolved, mutation led to sexes differentiating. Division of the reproductive task into sexual roles took the form of an ovum / fertilization sequence. The egg was therefore present at the same time as the creature that gestated/laid it, speciation into birds or turtles happens much later with such a scenario.

Answer 2

Eggs in general? I presume the question to mean the type of egg of the type one may find in the dairy case. The one that (in princlple) is capable of producing a CHICKEN.
In that case, I stand by my answer:
Both evolved at the same time, along with the rooster. No rooster, no chicks.

[not sure how a predistoric egg could ever produce a chicken, without the animal ITSELF evolving into the chicken too. The wikipedia answer is a case of overthinking the question, which is an age old one one of logical thinking.]

Answer 3

Lea is correct, the egg has been around for a few hundred million years. Chickens haven't been around nearly that long

Answer 4

come on now. it was the chicken that came first. god made it. u can possibly believe in evolution. i meant we did not come from rocks