Chicken or egg

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mysticrose's picture
Chicken or egg

Let’s have a break from atheistic or theistic kinds of debates.

Let’s discuss about this famous argument…

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

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Zaphod's picture
The chicken thought to be the

The chicken thought to be the product of the Asian red junglefowl (found mostly in the Himalayas and are now nearly extinct due to breeding with domesticated chickens at the forest edge) with no gene for yellow skin, hybrid with some traits of the grey junglefowl (which can breed viably with the non yellowskinned variety of Red Jungle fowl. Grey junglefowl is mostly found in peninsular India and is also endagered due to hunting and fishing practices. The domesticated red junglefowl was first domesticated in Asia about 5000 years ago and for use as a viable source of meat and eggs. Today they have been brought all around the world and still are a very productive source of meat and eggs. The grey junglefowl and red junglefowl both produced eggs before the chicken descended from them and therefore the egg came first.

SammyShazaam's picture
I have eaten these black

I have eaten these black skinned chickens... they are so good! It made me understand why people go through such painstaking effort to preserve heirloom species of livestock, and why people would like to clone dinosaurs. I bet they are delicious too :)

firebolt's picture
Nice Sammy! Let's bring back

Nice Sammy! Let's bring back the dinosaurs so we can have some Fred Flintstone ribs! Too funny! :)

mysticrose's picture
Very well explained, I haven

Very well explained, I haven't known about that facts. All I know is that chicken really produces delicious eggs and some people in my place decided to care some chickens is because they want their eggs. Chicken's meat is also one of the best.
The grey jungle fowl and red jungle fowl can produce eggs but it was their eggs and not of the chicken. The chicken's eggs cannot be produce with protein coming from the chicken ovaries, so I think chicken came first.

Zaphod's picture
The first chickens came form

The first chickens came form a chicken eggs produced by the interbreeding of grey and red junglefowl. Egg came first! then chickens made more eggs.

Lucyverse's picture
Whatever way you look at it,

Whatever way you look at it, the first chicken must have hatched from an egg. Surely?

Zaphod's picture
well in this case the first

Well, in the case of the first chickens they did hatch from eggs, but if we did not already know how they came to be they could have evolved form a lizard or other creature that emerged from primordial ooze long ago! that's the one of the points this question is often used to bring up "nobody knows!". It is also often used to bring up the other pointed question "Who cares!" or "Does it really matter!"some times it is used to just put an end to what the person asking it deems stupid what came first questions, like for example, "What came first God or the Universe?"

James's picture
to me is all about they need

to me is all about they need each other to exist....

Zaphod's picture
I think to most the point is

I think to most the point is it doesn't matter which came first as we got both of them. I find the question funny because to me at least when I think of the chicken coming first, it conjures images of chickens in lizard form emerging out of a puddle of primordial ooze!

Christopher Wright's picture
The egg came first. Eggs

The egg came first. Eggs existed for hundreds of millions of years before chickens. Even if you take the meaning to be, 'did the chicken or the chicken egg come first?' the answer is still the egg because the first chicken to hatch must have hatched from an egg genetically drawn from the same material as itself, and thus a chicken egg, even if the organism that laid that egg was not a chicken. However, as there is not really such a thing as 'the first chicken' - evolution does not work on such clear delineations - the question doesn't really work in this form, so we must refer to the original, in which case the answer remains the egg

mysticrose's picture
What produced that egg by the

What produced that egg by the way? To generalized it all, chicken came from the breed of junglefowl which made chicken also a junglefowl.

Unknowntyper's picture
The concept of an

The concept of an evolutionary threshold must be examined. At some point this threshold is broken leading to a chicken, the first true chicken(s). These animals obviously hatched, so the egg must have come first.
The bird that laid the egg(s) would have been on the other side of this evolutionary threshold, having been close to, but not, our "chicken".
This is an evolutionary ancestor to the chicken, and lead to the chicken by a series of genetic variations, mutations and natural selection processes. Ultimately some egg was laid giving rise to the first chicken.

Trevor's picture
The chicken and the egg are

The chicken and the egg are just perfect to explain how primitive our minds really are because we are completely puzzled by how this came to be.

I think that we will require a few million years of evolution to reach such comprehension, for now all we do is try to conect dots but we don't even know what those dots mean.

SammyShazaam's picture
Lol, too funny! And too true.

Lol, too funny! And too true.

I really hope that humans will someday evolve to a point where our minds are no longer blown by chickens. It's kind of embarrassing.

efpierce's picture
This is quite an interesting

This is quite an interesting question, we can probably trace back the ancestry correctly using genetic mapping but that doesn't answer this question thoroughly.

ginamoon's picture
I always thought that chicken

I always thought that chicken came first since the egg cannot live alone without that hen care. :D

That idea or concept of crossbreeding fowl is new to me.

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