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Which came first? The chicken or the egg?


cp1213

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?  

32 members have voted

  1. 1. Chicken or Egg?

    • Chicken
      2
    • Egg
      22
    • Undetermined
      8


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I’m on team egg but I wanna see your thoughts on this 

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RoseGoesToYale

The dinosaur, obviously. They're chicken ancestors.

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Animals laid eggs before there were chickens

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The various breeds of chicken have evolved from other breeds and species over time. Ergo the first chickens must have hatched from eggs laid by different species.

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29 minutes ago, Pan Ficto. (on hiatus?) said:

But single-celled organisms existed before there were eggs.

 

I shall die on this hill!

But chickens aren't single-celled organisms! Rather, some single-celled organisms became multi-cellular over time, some of which became animals, some of which became egg-laying reptiles, some of which gave birth to feathery reptiles, some of which gave birth to birds, some of which gave birth to what we would consider genetically close enough to a chicken to count as one. That chicken hatched from an egg that wasn't laid by a chicken...

 

... Unless you count all the organisms along the way as chickens, of course.

 

Edit: I do not.

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Thanks for all of your responses so far!

Interestingly I did a poll from another forum and the majority voted chicken instead.  

 

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Just now, cp1213 said:

Thanks for all of your responses so far!

Interestingly I did a poll from another forum and the majority voted chicken instead.  

 

... Did they explain why?

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1 minute ago, Zectarash said:

... Did they explain why?

No they didn't they just voted. 

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Just now, cp1213 said:

No they didn't they just voted. 

Aw.

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12 minutes ago, Zectarash said:

Unless you count all the organisms along the way as chickens, of course.

No, you just count the first organisms that they all evolved from, ie the single celled organisms that did not come from eggs. Those organisms eventually became chickens, but they still began as a single celled organism and not an egg.

 

4 minutes ago, Zectarash said:

... Did they explain why?

Because they all agree with me, clearly :P

 

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Just now, Zectarash said:

Aw.

Oh yea I remember the majority of my science class voted for chicken as well because they thought the chicken is only capable to lay chicken eggs 

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1 minute ago, Pan Ficto. (on hiatus?) said:

No, you just count the first organisms that they all evolved from, ie the single celled organisms that did not come from eggs. Those organisms eventually became chickens, but they still began as a single celled organism and not an egg.

But the question isn't whether the bacterium came before the egg, it's about the chicken...

 

1 minute ago, cp1213 said:

Oh yea I remember the majority of my science class voted for chicken as well because they thought the chicken is only capable to lay chicken eggs 

But... then what laid the first chicken egg if chickens only hatch from eggs?!

 

This is the part where I give an ambiguously-pronounced onomatopoeia for a scream of confusion.

 

Auuugh!

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RoseGoesToYale

Schrodinger's chicken!

 

At first it both existed as both chicken and egg, and we shall never know which because we weren't there to see it.

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11 minutes ago, Pan Ficto. (on hiatus?) said:

No, you just count the first organisms that they all evolved from, ie the single celled organisms that did not come from eggs. Those organisms eventually became chickens, but they still began as a single celled organism and not an egg.

 

Because they all agree with me, clearly :P

 

Technically every species share the same single-cell organism as an ancestor , but it can't be assumed as a chicken because the organism would branch out to many species that are vastly different from a chicken. Also single-celled organism can't directly become chickens; the species which are not chickens came first (the closest I could find were the ornithomimosauria)and then they would lay a egg that would become the chicken. 

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19 minutes ago, Zectarash said:

 

 

But... then what laid the first chicken egg if chickens only hatch from eggs?!

 

This is the part where I give an ambiguously-pronounced onomatopoeia for a scream of confusion.

 

Auuugh!

Exactly xDDD

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Mackenzie Holiday

Whatever we decide to consider to be the first chicken is going to be a little arbitrary because no species evolves into another in a single generation. There's no single cutoff point. But if we did choose a single historical chicken as the beginning of that new species (the very first organism that all modern chickens could theoretically breed with with the same success as they could with other modern chickens), that individual chicken was an egg before it was an adult chicken.

 

Think of the question "what came first, the fetus or the adult human?" you can make all the same arguments for both sides. If we say that the first human was Lucy, well, Lucy was a fetus before growing into an adult. So the chicken version of Lucy was an egg before hatching into a chicken. So I vote egg. 🙃

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  • 2 weeks later...
Phantasmal Fingers

To me this is a koan designed to prevent one from being exclusively stuck in dualistic thinking. 

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On 11/6/2019 at 1:47 AM, cp1213 said:

Interestingly I did a poll from another forum and the majority voted chicken instead.  

That's odd. I wonder why.

 

Anyway, chickens evolved from theropod dinosaurs that lived over 230 million years ago. Chickens, even if we allow jungle fowl of the Gallus species of 50 million years ago to be called "chickens", came much later. Theropods laid eggs. Thus, the egg came before chickens.

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Calligraphette_Coe

Neither. It was the nucleotides in RNA and DNA. And they were all invented by Donald Trump. So the Democrats better be careful, as all life on earth as we know it could be in peril if impeachment goes forward. ( There! A two-fer: politics AND science! )

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I agree that clearly if by egg you mean any species' egg, then that came first.

If egg by egg you mean a chicken egg, then it becomes a matter of definition; whether a chicken egg is an egg that is laid by a chicken, or an egg that hatches into a chicken. i.e. at some point there was an animal that was somatically not a chicken and reproductively a chicken, do you call that animal a chicken or a non-chicken that laid a chicken egg?

On 11/6/2019 at 9:25 AM, Mackenzie Holiday said:

There's no single cutoff point.

There is if you define precisely enough what a chicken is.

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Mackenzie Holiday
1 minute ago, lapat67 said:

 

On 11/6/2019 at 12:25 AM, Mackenzie Holiday said:

There's no single cutoff point.

There is if you define precisely enough what a chicken is.

I know, I literally made that point in the very next sentence.

 

On 11/6/2019 at 12:25 AM, Mackenzie Holiday said:

 But if we did choose a single historical chicken as the beginning of that new species (the very first organism that all modern chickens could theoretically breed with with the same success as they could with other modern chickens), that individual chicken was an egg before it was an adult chicken.

 

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A proto-chicken creature can lay an egg with mutations that create a chicken. A lifeform can not spontaneously morph into a chicken. Why is this even a question.

 

I mean, the whole thing assumes that there is a solid line between a chicken and non-chicken, but that's how evolution works. Reproduction.

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Janus the Fox

The cell came first 😛

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The chicken. The egg still hasn't found out how to cross the road.

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It’s neither.

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