• Question: which comes first the chicken or the egg

    Asked by anon-202044 to Andy, Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily on 5 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-201689.
    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 5 Mar 2019:


      This is sort of a trick question, but I’ll say egg. Here’s my logic. Chickens evolved from the descendants of wild bird called a junglefowl. So, firstly, did these junglefowls evolve gradually into what we call chickens now or did it happen in a sudden jump? Either way, there is a moment in time when a bird which could be described as being ‘more’ junglefowl than chicken, lays an egg which hatches to give a bird that is more chicken than junglefowl. Since the chicken comes from an egg and its parents are more junglefowl than chicken (it is the first chicken), then, using this logic, the egg comes first.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 5 Mar 2019:


      I thought about this quite a bit and I have decided that the egg came first

      Here is my reasoning:

      Chickens are only about 5,000 years old. The chickens ancestor is something called a red junglefowl (which probably evolved from some kind of dinosaur, better check me on that one I’m not a palaeontologist), anyway- we came along and domesticated the junglefowl.

      This means that we started selectively breeding for traits that we wanted. We probably picked the birds that laid the most eggs or were the most tasty to go on and produce the next generation so we could have more eggs and tasty chicken. Very slowly over lots of time we were changing the DNA of the junglefowl to something looking more and more like a chicken.

      Then one day, the changed junglefowl laid a slightly mutated egg and BAM out came the first chicken. So really, A) eggs have been around for much longer than chickens and B) the first chicken came out of an egg which came out of something which wasn’t quite a chicken, it was an almost completely domesticated junglefowl.

    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 5 Mar 2019:


      Egg. The non avian dinosaurs and reptiles were using eggs long before the avian dinosaurs evolved into the junglefowl and then the chicken. So the egg as a concept is much older than the chicken

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 5 Mar 2019:


      We all agree: egg, and for the same reasons!

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 6 Mar 2019:


      I’d have to say egg for the same reasons too!

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:


      The scientific reasoning given by George, Emily & Sarah points towards egg!

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