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The Chicken May Have Come Before the Egg
Muondecay writes "The age old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, has been tentatively answered. The verdict? The chicken, or rather a key protein needed to form the shell of the egg. The protein, called ovocledidin-17, was known to be involved in binding calcite molecules that formed the shells, but the mechanism behind this was unclear until now. The protein acts as a molecular machine, binding to nanoparticles of calcite and guiding them to begin self-assembly of the shell. This gives tremendous insight for developing methods of nano-scale self-assembly based on natural processes, as well as settling heated cocktail party arguments everywhere."
That page is an error page. Can someone find the real link?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
The abstract link could hardly be worse. Here is one that actually works for the appropriate paper.
Nice job, slashdot editors.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Which came first, the egg or the eggshell.
Thank me when this becomes a major philosophical debating point.
I can't help but feel that the reason why the "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" debate has continued to rage, outside Texas and the other retarded US states which deny Darwin, has a lot to do with arguments like this one. Maybe everyone who can tell the difference between a-protein-now-found-in-chickens and a chicken has long ago come to the conclusion that what came first was some animal different enough from a chicken that we wouldn't call it that, which laid an egg that contained an animal similar enough to a chicken that we would call it a chicken. And only the logic deficient and the religious crazies are left arguing the options.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dunno... dinosaurs laid eggs long before chickens roamed the earth.
Nobody came until the rooster did.
This gives tremendous insight for developing methods of nano-scale self-assembly based on natural processes, as well as settling heated cocktail party arguments everywhere.
Could somebody of more intellectual firepower exactly how this insight reaches the papers conclusion, based on this statement, or the researches implications, for the rest of us less biologically inclined?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
All chickens come from eggs, the first chicken egg would have been laid by the ancestor to the chicken.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The egg came first. It is the only natural answer because there had to be an egg before there could be a chicken. Now usually the smartasses at this points out that the egg couldn't be there because it must have been laid by a chicken. To that the answer is that it was of course laid by another hen (different, not by much, but yet different) this process continues today even as we try to breed new stocks based on different properties in hens and cocks, creating new breeds.
Am I missing something? It sounds like they're saying that the egg came first, but they explicitly state the exact opposite.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The article talks about a protein which has been coopted into egg production in birds. It doesn't deal with the sensational headline at all. The first creature which we could call a chicken came from an egg. Its bird ancestors hatched from eggs. The reptiles from which they derived laid eggs long before the protein in question made its way into eggs.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
That the chicken omelette came last.
The rooster.
Dinosaurs laid eggs long before chickens existed. Done.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why did the chicken cross the road?
What's interesting is that the mechanism by which eggshell is constructed is now better understood, perhaps well enough to lead to practical applications.
But to call it a solution to the "chicken or the egg" problem is just a really really lame attempt at humor, not to mention almost entirely misleading.
If that wasn't enough, this case just tries to describe how an eggshell typical of chickens came to be. If one were to accept that the original "big question" is "philosophical" at the least, then it surely isn't just about chickens - what about eggs of fish or amphibians? Leathery shells?
It doesn't even have much to do with the "big question."
One that hath name thou can not otter
Typical non-reporting by todays news outlets. Nothing to see here, move along... the journal on which this tripe is based discusses the make-up of a chicken shell (how it allows a baby chick to peck its way out, but prevent other mature birds from pecking their way in), and has absolutely nothing to do with the age-old arguement toted here and elsewhere.
Your statement has serious implications for the stork and his associates, as it discredits their business of bringing innocent babbys in eggs across the hemispheres. Due to your inflammatory and libelous allegations, Storks, LLC, will see you in court.
Storks Inc, is a family owned limited liability corporations, specializing in brining babbys to homes, and selling the new EggAborter Eggbeater. For $19.95 you can get this fabulous...oh wait, wrong reality.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
specializing in brining babbys
Not a typo, they are hard boiled in salt water and cooked to perfection.
FTFM
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
No, it didn't. The Mainstream Media sucks at reporting science :\
Evolution occurs through mutations. The applicable mutation would have occurred during the egg stage. The first chicken with an appropriate amount of mutation would have happened at the egg stage. The applicable article would have been an evolution a stage ahead of the actual genetic level.
Most people are really bad at dealing with ambiguities and shades of gray. To them the problem is a dichotomy Since the problem isn't really a dichotomy, it doesn't have a solution as a dichotomy, hence the endless arguing.
What came first? The molecule or the cell? The prion or the virus?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I always thought this one was pretty simple. Dinosaurs laid eggs. Birds are directly descended from dinosaurs. The chicken is a bird. The egg came before the chicken.
It's about a protein that modern chickens have that facilitates the development of the modern egg.
Therefore, at some time in the past that protein was NOT present in chickens (or proto-chickens).
Then, a non-protein-carrying proto-chicken laid an egg which hatched a mutant proto-chicken who DID have that protein.
So the answer, once again, is that the EGG was first.
Additionally, other animals laid eggs well before chickens ever appeared. Dinosaurs, for example.
And there were certainly dinosaur eggs before there were ever chickens.
And fish eggs. And insect eggs. So unless the chickens crossed the time barrier to get away from Colonel Sanders, eggs came before chickens.
Chickens are by definition born of an egg. EVERY chicken ever lived did. So, the egg came first. What gave birth to that egg was not 100% chicken.. So Say I.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1719790&cid=32909122
You and he should continue to rage that debate.
Also, I just want to point out that while you're using reason, and reasoning out the problem, you aren't using logic since your argument does not follow any logical statements or conclusions in logical form.
That seems to be a commonly tossed around misconception, and people (especially here) like to proclaim themselves to be bastions of logic, even though they don't know how to use it and cannot apply it.
Logic is a very powerful form of argument, reasoning is not.
I never read anything on it, but I assume it goes something like this: some chicken-like animal ancestor is being killed while they are carrying their offspring. Therefore, the animals that randomly develop methods to allow earlier separation - in the case, hardened eggs - developed harder and harder eggs, that can earlier and earlier be left on their own for longer periods of time.
Putting aside extremely rare mutations in DNA (usually only caused by nuclear anonmoly), whatever DNA you have when you are born, you have when you die.
Life forms do not mutate/evolve/ during their lifespan; the mutations occur at the DNA copying phase when they are creating the next generation.
As such - the egg (IE embryo) came first. It is totally fundamentally impossible for the chicken to come first, because the chicken came from an embryo.
I always took the view that sea creatures and dinosaurs laid eggs, long before there was any semblance of chicken or bird-like animals. No one ever specified it had to be a chicken egg.
Chicken vs. Egg always cracks me up.
Surely there were animals capable of laying eggs before there were Chickens.
Since it is possible for animals that aren't Chickens to lay eggs, but it isn't possible to get a Chicken from anything but an egg, the egg must logically have come before the Chicken.
So... the first chicken no doubt hatched from an egg laid by an animal that could almost (but not quite) be classified as a Chicken.
Specifically, the Bible states fish were created first, birds of the air second, and mammals third, which may roughly line up with evolution, if you're supposing birds evolved from dinosaurs, and dinosaurs came out of the seas, and mammals came along after the dinosaurs left the scene...
Kinda lines up; weird, huh?
I agree, a lot of people see things on the extreams. Sure there are things in the world that are opposites. But most of what goes on usually is in a borderless state. You see it every where, political parties who debate the same crap for generations, both saying the other is wrong and assumes that one is right. While chances are is that they are both wrong.
It is also why I equally dislike the hard evangelical religions who figure most of the world will go to hell. And the far athiests who see's any one with the idea that God could exists as a product of iditocy.
As paridoxal this statement seems. Normally if you know that someone has a belief or phelosophy different then your own. And you see this person as sub human. Then you are probably a polerized person. No more enlighted then the rest of the public
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well.. all truly educated people know the rooster came first.
You should give examples. The finest one is Roy Comfort talking about the banana. Search YouTube for it. Comedy Goldmine, I promise.
Ohhhhh, and Peanut Butter Is An Atheists Worst Nightmare.
Funny thing here is that if Texas is the only state that doesn't entirely fall for darwinism, 49 states are unaware of the fact that scientists have yet to find solid proof of one creature becoming another creature...ever! This brings up two points:
1- NOW it makes sense why the US has got it's current government. Only one state was smart enough to recognize when someone is taking them for a fool.
2- Micro evolution is STILL a reality even if MACRO-evolution isn't. Otherwise, everyone would look pretty much exactly the same...
It's just Creation v. Evolution. There is no "debate". In Genesis, God created birds (not eggs); meanwhile, the fossil records clearly shows creatures all the way back to the oceanic ancestors of chickens laying eggs long before any birds, let alone specifically chickens. Any scientist who is still "pondering" this should go hang out with Paul Davies or some other Templeton Prize winning fool.
Actually, the Chicken came first, no matter which side of the religious argument you fall on.
It is really easy if you think about it. The key here is what is a chicken egg. I went to the store and purchased 1 dozen chicken eggs, and checked each and every one of them. There were no chickens in any of them (though enough egg parts to make a huge omelet). So, it is not called a chicken egg because it contains a chicken, therefore it must be called a chicken egg because it came out of a chicken.
Therefore, the chicken had to come first.
The real question is where did the chicken come from. Creationists would claim it was created (and thus the chicken came first), evolutionists would claim it came from an egg that came from a creature very similar to, but not quite a chicken. This egg did not come from a chicken, so was not a chicken egg, but the newly born chicken still came before it laid any of its own eggs (which would be the first chicken eggs).
Oh god, I can't believe this drivel reached Slashdot. Let me explain what's happened here:
... stuff ... inside the chicken that's ... necessary for producing eggs?
<Reporter> Hi, Scientist, thanks for meeting with me today. I'd like to write a story about your work. Could you please explain a little?
<Scientist> We've definitively proven and carefully described the role that protein ovocledidin-17 plays in eggshell formation
<Reporter> Wait, so let me get this straight, you found
<Scientist> Er... yes.
<Reporter> So... that means the chicken came before the egg, right...?
[Scientist to self: Oh god, why couldn't Bob handled this damned interview]
<Scientist> Obviously, it's not really what we were trying to get out of our simulations, but it's an interesting question isn't it?
[The above is a direct quote from researcher Colin Freeman. You can see he is declining to answer by way of polite deflection.]
<Reporter> Excellent! Well, that's about all we need, it was great to meet you and we'll be in touch.
<Scientist> Er... nice... you too...
[Reporter goes back to HQ to write the article]
<Reporter> Okay, I've got this material about a chicken protein... um... ovocledidin-17... it's in chickens and it helps makes eggs and MAN is this stuff boring. Hey I know! What was it he said about the chicken and egg thing I asked him? [Looks at notes.] Well, alright! He didn't deny my proposition that the chicken came first! He must be agreeing with me! Alright! I'll just title my story "Scientists answer ages-old Chicken or Egg question." That oughta grab some eyes.
[Every news outlet in America proceeds to run story]
[Smart people everywhere cringe and sigh]
Why you got to hate??? if you want to believe you came from monkies,,, that's fine.. I believe that I was designed... NEITHER has been proven.. so why you acting like that??
I am very pleased with the answer too. Not to gloat or anything, but I told you so
Now we can move on to the really hard questions: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a BP oil well spews millions of gallons of oil, but nobody's allowed close enough to see it, does it really sully the water?
How does this prove anything? Do reptile eggs have this same protein? It seems to me that of course what came first was live birth fish, and that soft multi cellular eggs came next, and then amphibians with thicker surfaces that could survive changing water levels came next, and then land survivalble eggs, then leatherlike eggs like reptile eggs, that eventually give way to hard shell eggs. The literal chicken came far after the egg, simply because the egg as a reproductive device evolved far before birds of any kind.
The Reptiles and Fishes lay eggs even before the chicken even exist
But I've never seen a chicken with a shell.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
The Chicken is the Egg, YOU FUCKING MORONS.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
The bit. This is all a simulation.
If one accepts the premise of natural selection based evolution, then the only possibility is that the egg came first.
The first chicken would have been laid in an egg, whose parent was something other than a chicken (perhaps a bit more dinosaur like, reflecting its earlier origins).
The paper as I understand it isn't showing whether the "chicken" or the egg came first, but rather, the original chicken-like organism (either a dinosaur or something earlier) or the egg it came in. These are actually two very different things.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Unless you believe in Lamarkian evolution, the egg had to come first.
It doesn't help that the question is vague. Dinosaurs were laying eggs long before chickens were around. However if you make the question "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg," you then need to define if a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken or an egg that would hatch a chicken (if it was fertilized.) After the question is properly defined the answer is easy. (Personally i think it makes more sense to define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken, since you can make that determination before the egg hatches, so i think my answer differs from yours.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
A donkey crossed with a horse gets you a mule. That's a different kind of creature.
Or caterpillars turn into butterflies, if you want to take that view.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Stephen J Gould: "A chicken is just an egg's way of making another egg."
I'm curious, other than "tentatively" satisfying this rather pointless question/joke, was there any other point in wasting time and money on this? Perhaps they were actually looking for a cure for cancer and just stumbled on this? Oh, wait! I see that now we've figured out a way to create our own eggshells overnight. Phew, that's certainly a relief, I was worried about mankind not having that to put in our time capsule for future generations to gawk at...
Perhaps British scientists could now get back to working on the "little" problems, like figuring out a fucking way to actually fix this "small" oil leak they have over here...Just a thought...
This report is total BS and not worthy of mention. We know that reptiles lay eggs (not all but a good number), and we know that dinosaurs laid eggs (having found fossils). There is extremely strong evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and at some point in that evolution, the chicken appeared. Clearly the thing that the first chicken (wherever you care to draw the line) hatched from was an egg. So the egg came before the chicken.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
There's answer A which is the egg came first because eggs evolved long ago and many other animals lay eggs. (Like dinosaurs and fish which existed long before chickens.) If you mean a chicken egg then they evolved together. (IE there's is no hard and fast delination between not chicken/chicken and like wise none for not chicken egg/chicken egg.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Only a chicken could produce a chicken egg. Whatever egg hatched the first chicken was not a chicken egg (which is what the question implies), but a whatever-the-parent-was egg. I wouldn't throw around terms like "logic deficient" so quickly if I were you, because there's a perfectly logical argument against your position.
Daetrin also raised a valid point, that it depends on how you define the question (and the definition is arbitrary).
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Remember: eggs cannot come. A chicken rubbing up against one, however, can.
On a genetic scale the egg formed long before the chicken -- like dinosaur egg long ago.
But even on a more "recent" time scale the egg came first. For clearly a not-chicken laid an egg and from it was hatched a chicken. Of course this was unbeknown to the not-chicken, which simply thought, "you are one ugly not-chicken".
To think otherwise would argue the the not-chicken did not lay eggs but rather gave live birth --which would not even be a bird. I'm pretty sure the Chicken isn't the missing link between Viviparous and Oviporous.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Aristotle: The chicken came first. The chicken is an actual chicken, but an egg is only a potential chicken. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/aristotle/section7.rhtml
I am disappointed that article writers have to make things up to be noticed. The article does not prove that a NC (non chicken) came before. All does show the complex and efficient design of the egg.
The problem is people are force to believe in the story tale of evolution and hence must come up with ridiculous stories to try to explain the chicken and egg.
I've heard things from pigoens, pheasants to even large lizzords could lay chicken eggs which is laughable. What we know as a chicken is a bird.
Natural Selection is a fact and that means if we saw what a chicken origonally looked like, we would probably wonder what bird it was. Like the great veryance in dogs from Great Danes to chawawas.
Natueral selection is a opposite of "evolution". NS works by the filtering out of geanes from the pool availbe. This means dogs will only produce dogs, cats to cats and birds to birds.
Example for NS filtering geans for dogs.
LS MS 2 dogs both are median in size, Long, Small Median & Small
LM LS SM SS medain tall, median, small median, very small.
Now if thoses SS dogs bread, you will only every get small dogs.
SM SS
SS MS SS SS
SS SS SS SS
SS SS SS CHICKEN oops the last dog turned into a chicken and layed an egg.
So Natural Selection will not produce creatures who couldn't lay eggs before but now can!
The Chicken egg came from a bird, in any case it was either created as a chicken or not, the birds will always be a bird kind.
The debate about Chicken and the egg is based on people rejecting the design choice.
This is the first time of me raving about bad science called evolution NS isn't evolution
Tell me if your interested to hear more guys
We're missing the bit about Evolution. Chickens and Eggs didn't appear, they evolved. What eventually became a chicken, was laying eggs long before a chicken walked the earth. In describing what defines a chicken, one attribute we can mention is that it "lays eggs". When doing the same with an egg, we cannot argue that a requirement is that it contains or came from a chicken. So, an egg is necessary for a chicken.
A chicken has to sit on top of the egg in order for it to hatch into a chicken.
THEREFOR CHICKEN CAME FIRST
THE END
Woww... I think chicken came first than egg. The main purpose is to reproduce and earn egg, not produce chicken from eggs.
could you please explain the riddle of schrodinger's chicken?
it laid an egg, and yet it did not lay an egg, and the egg, that may or may not exist, possibly hatched a chicken, which may or may not be the same chicken that laid the egg, because we don't know which came first, if either came at all. and then schrodinger killed the chicken, or maybe he didn't, and nobody knows what the hell he might have or might not have done to the egg, whether or not he killed the chicken, that may or may not have come first. perhaps in an alternate timeline in copenhagen
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The headline is far more interesting than the story...
This is exactly why people stop buying papers.
(or reading slashdot?)
I can't believe the headline applied... the paper is in Angewandte Chemie - which means Applied Chemistry... it's an applied chemistry paper, not an evolutionary/biology paper. Pfthpt.
I think it's just a basic philosophy question to help make people think. Something like, "does a tree falling in the forest make sound if no one is around to hear it?" Obviously the same physical actions occur either way, it's just a matter of whether you define sound as needing someone to hear it or not.
Same thing, it takes some logical thinking to get to the answer, and it's a fun little puzzle along the way.
Qxe4
Ok, The big bang begot the eggs! The chickens are lucky they don't have yolk on their faces, and are extraordinarily grateful of this! For if the big bang let loose their yolks, none of them would exist! Now the chickens needed to pray to their yellow-feathered god, to thank him for the big bang not blowing up their eggy ancestors. Their god requested a sacrifice, so they gave up the gift of flight. This makes them easy to catch, and provided KFC with a wondrous business opportunity...
So basically, the argument can continue forever!!! Yes! More cocktail parties for me!
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
The egg came first because it came from the eggplant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant
What came first? The molecule or the cell? The prion or the virus?
Not sure if you want real answers to those or not, but obviously the molecule, and evidence suggests the prion. However, with prions your question doesn't quite make sense because it's not like viruses descended from prions. Prions are simply "rogue" proteins which force proteins that they come in contact with to conform to the same secondary structure (usually beta folded sheets). It is thought that amino acid chains probably formed (perhaps without any necessary "function") early during the origin of life, and were quite possibly prion-like. Here's an interesting paper about it:
Milner-White, E.J. & Russell, M.J., 2008. Predicting the conformations of peptides and proteins in early evolution. Biology direct, 3, 3. Available at: http://biology-direct.com/content/3/1/3.
And, obviously, since molecules are required to make cells (as cells are made up of molecules), the molecule would have to come first. There are some hypotheses about the origins of life suggesting that it is possible that most or all of of the biochemistry of early cells were in place before they even became cells. Here's a good starting point read about that:
Martin, W. & Russell, M.J., 2003. On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 358(1429), 59-83; discussion 83-5. Available at: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/358/1429/59.abstract.
Anyway, like I said, don't know if you were looking for possible answers to those questions, but I'm bored, and these papers are pretty interesting. ;)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The link to the abstract of the article is here: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123506601/abstract
It reads:
And for what it's worth, this article is completely irrelevant to the question at hand, and the egg came well, well before the chicken.
Good thing it's babbys and not babys that are being brined.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Well, that says more about your bias and your own lack of education than anything else - since question of this form go back to the ancient Greek philosophers. There's much more to it than your simpleminded literal reading.
I made a poll about this a while ago. It can be found here: http://www.aqfl.net/?q=node/6021 ... ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Every kid knows the first eggs were put out by the Easter Bunny.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Errrr, no. You have it pretty much backwards. The way it works is: almost chicken lays an egg, which has a mutation (or is a combination of genes from mutated parents) which brings its DNA profile just over the threshold to true chickenhood. The egg itself was probably already pretty similar to modern chicken eggs, including the hard shell, which had probably been around for millions of years before, although whether or not you'd call it a "chicken egg" depends on how you define "chicken egg" (could be: "egg from which a chicken hatches", or could be: "egg laid by a chicken").
Obviously this proves that we (the religious nuts) have been correct the hole time. God made the chicken so that it could make the protein ovocledidin-17 which acts as a molecular machine binding the calcite which forms the egg. We've been saying exactly that for centuries if you'd just listened to reason you'd know that,
... is the most absurd debate I have ever heard, it is analogous to asking, "which came first, the mother or the child?". Of course the chicken, which developed from another creature, came first in order to lay the egg.
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1. All Chickens come from eggs.
2. Not all eggs come from Chickens.
The egg came first.
And it did not happen over night, but by gradual changes caused by the egg's environment.
Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. If you know about evolution, then you know that there is pretty much no difference and no line between the chicken that hatches from the egg, and the animal that made the egg in the first place. The only reason we could even call a chicken a chicken and a red Junglefowl a red Junglefowl (this animal being the known direct ancestor of the modern chicken) is that at some point, a group of red Junglefowl got separated from the species and evolved and bred into what we now call chickens. It is only the separation and hundreds of years of non-interbreeding that creates speciation. So, the paradox remains. The chicken egg could not have been created by a non-chicken and a chicken couldn't have been born without hatching from the egg.
Trying to solve the paradox through an evolution trick doesn't work because evolution is about small changes over hundreds or thousands of years. If a chicken hatches from the egg of a species that we don't consider a chicken, then we could toss the theory of evolution out the window.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
In the beginning God created the chicken, not the egg.
The riddle asks which came first, the chicken, or the [chicken] egg. If you don't get the implied "chicken egg" part of that, you're simply an idiot, since anything else would be, and always have been, completely pointless.
Bringing evolution into the mix most certainly DOES NOT INSTANTLY SOLVE THE RIDDLE, it merely makes the question a bit more narrow... We can now rephrase it to: "What came first, an egg similar enough to be considered a chicken's egg, or an animal similar enough to be considered a chicken?"
But really, that's just to suffer the pedants. I'd much rather paraphrase that into something simple, like: "What came first, the chicken, or the egg?"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
At some point a chicken must have appeared that lays an egg. That chicken would not have come out of an egg. The whole argument rests on whether that was a chicken or not. If it was, then the chicken was first, if not, we're talking egg.
But if the thing that laid the egg didn't come from an egg - was it a chicken? Right, sorted, egg first... Now where's that cat?
Sigh.. Another way to phrase it would be "what's the origin of species?"
How we know is more important than what we know.
The researcher who did the research himself admits in the article that he was not addressing the question of which came first.
The reporter imposed his own point of view on the research, and figured linking it into the whole "chicken egg question" would get him more attention.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The question is a red herring, as is the answer. The real issue is why creationists deny evolution. All religions do eugenics, they breed their adherents to be supportive of and subject to the administration. This results in subhuman strains of our genome, and is thus a crime against humanity. To escape censure, the creationists deny that evolution occurs, and thus devolution is impossible.
so what could be said instead is that the whatever-the-parent-was laid the whatever-the-parent-was egg and out came the chicken which then laid a chicken egg? so technically the chicken came first? ahh but the problem is that this question refers to both the egg the chicken lays and the egg it hatches from, so if you consider the former it was the chicken, but if you consider the latter it was the egg. Damn the arbitrariness of the English language.
Eggs existed before chickens, Eggs with shells existed before chickens, the only debate remaining was did a Chicken's Egg exist before a chicken ...
That's a semantic question
Is a chicken's egg an egg laid by a chicken - if so then the chicken came first
or
Is a chicken's egg an egg that a chicken hatches from - if so then the egg came first
Case closed ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Which comes first? The cosmogony, or the evidence?
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
Turtles all the way down.
Deleted
I hear they're introducing an Oscar for best whoosh. Better get that tux cleaned!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's two approaches to the discussion:
1: Point out that chickens were not the first animal to lay eggs, and as such, the egg predates the chicken by millions of years.
2: Assume that the discussion is about chicken eggs - NOT eggs in general. In this case, the answer depends on the definition of a chicken egg:
A: A chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken = the chicken came first
B: A chicken egg is an egg containing a chicken = the egg came first
Case closed.
Of course chicken came before the egg: God first created animals - including chickens. Then chickens laid the first eggs... It's very simple if you believe in God's creation abilities...
Dinosaurs laid eggs - we've found lots of them.
Chickens evolved from dinosaurs, i.e. came after them.
The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
No sig today...
I went to a restaurant for dinner and ordered eggs benedict and coq au vin. The eggs came first.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
My thinking was "Didn't dinosaurs lay eggs? Were there chickens around then? So, the egg came first, as nobody defined it to be a chicken egg."
Recursive relation fail! A proper inductive analysis says the chicken came first.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Eggs, including calcite-shelled eggs, were around LONG before chickens were.
For example, fossil dinosaur egg shell consists of calcite.
It is common knowledge that the chicken came first. It is also common knowledge that as a result the egg invented foreplay.
Obviously.
Everyone knows that first came the Easter Bunny, who laid the egg, which hatched into the chicken.
Wow, I remember when your signature had a typo, and now I have a better understanding of why.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Q: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg ???
A: Everybody knows it was the *ROOSTER* !!! :-)
Trying to solve the paradox through an evolution trick doesn't work because evolution is about small changes over hundreds or thousands of years. If a chicken hatches from the egg of a species that we don't consider a chicken, then we could toss the theory of evolution out the window.
Not really... at some point, there MUST be a creature that you call "not quite a chicken" and it lays an egg that hatches a creature you call "only just a chicken".
It's similar to the silly paradox about a man's beard. One hair on a man's face is not a beard. Around 7000 or so definitely is a beard. So, how many hairs does it take to be a beard? Is there a number where removing one is "not quite" a beard, or adding one more makes it a beard? By common layman's terms, probably not, but at some point you really have to admit that your definition wasn't good enough to begin with. What exactly IS a beard? And what exactly IS a chicken?
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Even if they did specify "chicken egg" (and you could argue it's implied by the question), the very fact that chickens (we believe) evolved from dinosaurs means that the very first animal we would recognise as a chicken hatched from an egg, albeit the egg of some animal part way on the evolutionary scale between the two.
Immense leaps of faith I can understand, but it must take a gargantuan amount of optimism to look at your fellow man and think he was designed as the ultimate creation by an all powerful god as opposed to him being a few steps removed from a monkey. Has the internet not swayed your opinion at all?
A chicken egg must be an egg which a chicken lays and not an egg from which a chicken hatches, or we wouldn't refer to unfertilised eggs as chicken eggs, we'd need a new description to indicate that no chicken would ever hatch from said egg.
To answer your own question, go buy a sixpack of eggs. Are they labelled as unfertilised eggs or chicken eggs? If it's the latter, then the semantic argument is resolved, a chicken egg must be one that comes from a chicken, not one that gives birth to a chicken. In either event, the whole question ignores the fact that time is not linear and that therefore chickens and eggs came into existence at the same time :)
The chicken-or-egg question hinges on what we think "egg" means in this context. Do we mean simply an egg, or an egg that contains a chicken, or an egg laid by a chicken?
If you look at the evolutionary family tree of chickens, you will see at some point in time ancestral fowl that were clearly not chickens. At some point between then and now, we can arbitrarily choose the first bird we will call a "chicken". The first chicken, by definition, hatched from an egg that contained a chicken, but was laid by a fowl that was not a chicken.
My own view is that "egg" in this context most logically means an egg contaiing a chicken, and that therefore the egg came first, but it's impossible to say that one definition or the other is necessarily right or wrong.
This is an absurdity ..
Any 'chicken' (or any other creature, for that matter) must come about by a genetic mutation .. and *that* requires that the egg come first. To 'be the first' means that there were no 'predecessors' .. ie, its progenitor could NOT be a chicken. Therefore, it is illogical to conclude other than that the first creature that did possess the mutation(s)
necessary for 'chickenhood' must have had that condition in its egg-form.
Seriously, even my 14 year old son, on his own, some years ago, had concluded this! He announced it at dinner .. "Dad, i figured out what really had to have come first!"
So, what evil is this committee perpetuating!? Ruining the future scientific career of a child???? My oh my..... Is this the same committee who designed the elephant?
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
But aren't mules almost always sterile? Even though rarely some females are fertile this would be more "against all odds" with evolution in play. I don't believe that specific example supports your position.
Nonsense! The egg came first and here's why. The chicken-like creature that created the first real chicken egg was not technically a chicken in genetic terms. This creature looked very much like a chicken, but by a strict genetic definition, the creature was not a chicken. The resulting egg however did contain the genetic encoding that correctly specified the structure of a true living chicken. Therefore, the egg had to come first.
What's this all about? supper before breakfast? :P
What enlightened state are you from? I would like to know so that I may list it when I make overly generalized claims about which states are full of elitist assholes.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
The chicken came at the same time as the egg, but inside the egg, *THEN* It destroyed it !!!!
Pretty sure they died off before the first Christmas.
65 million, 2 thousand, I can see getting confused once the numbers are bigger than 100, but still...
Most people are really bad at dealing with ambiguities and shades of gray.
Oh, so you're saying I'm stupid?
sudo ergo sum
Of course the answer to the question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg" must be "the egg" if the question only implies eggs in general, since the animal that chickens evolved from most certainly laid eggs.
If the question implies "Chicken eggs", it all depends on what you mean by "chicken egg", is a chicken egg "an egg that was laid by a chicken" or "a egg that a chicken hatches from".
If it is the former, then the big answer is "The chicken", if it is the latter, the answer is "the egg".
This really is a no-brainer!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Fish have mercury in them?
Dumping hazardous waste into the ocean is not a good idea...
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
If the question implies "Chicken eggs", it all depends on what you mean by "chicken egg", is a chicken egg "an egg that was laid by a chicken" or "a egg that a chicken hatches from".
If it is the former, then the big answer is "The chicken", if it is the latter, the answer is "the egg".
The counterpart: What is meant by the 'Chicken"? Does it mean a thing that hatches out of a "Chicken egg" or the thing that lays a "Chicken egg".
Which came first, the pequenino or the tree?
A chicken is still a chicken even if you don't know where it came from (test tube) or lays no eggs.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
First of all the question is stated incorrectly. Nobody in their right mind would argue that chickens, or birds for that matter, existed before eggs. It should be "What came first, the chicken or the CHICKEN egg".
Second, the question can not be answered by biology or genetics, but rather needs linguistics and semantics. It all boils down to the definition of what a chicken egg is:
1. A chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken
2. A chicken egg is an egg that contains a chicken embryo
Once an agreement on this definition has been reached, the answer to the question becomes one of those you see on late night TV games... glaringly obvious.
It's not necessarily mutation - that first chicken had two parents that were kind of chicken like. Maybe it was mutations, maybe it was cross-breeding, probably some combination of the two. Anyway, it's not-quite-chicken mom laid a chicken egg that grew into a chicken. There's also the question of whether that egg was strictly a chicken egg - it had a chicken embryo in it, but might have had the structure of a chicken egg, or it might have had the structure of a not-quite-chicken egg. Either way, it would have been pretty close.
Another argument is that the first chicken egg (laid by not-quite-chickens) might not have successfully grown into a chicken; something could have eaten it first, so the first actual chicken could have been from the second or third chicken egg...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The egg that had the first chicken embryo in it might still have been a not-quite-chicken egg. Depends on what the differences are between the first "real" chicken and its parents - did they include the structure of the eggshells or the interior plumbing of the egg, or was that stuff all the same and maybe the feathers or feet or eyes or something were different. I think the egg would have been close enough to chicken-egg-like that it still wins, even if it's not identical.
Also, it's not clear that chickens evolved through natural selection - proto-chickens did, but the chickens themselves may have come from human-managed crossbreeding of multiple kinds of domesticated birds.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No, that would be a completely different question entirely.
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The chicken or the egg?" Not, "chicken egg". So you can imply chicken egg, but let's not. So I agree the egg came first. How would you define a chicken, by it's egg? or by it's what-- genome?
Even if you were to ask "...chicken egg?" by definition if an egg produces a chicken, isn't it a chicken egg? The mutation, I would argue, that is the first chicken has occured within the egg.
Else, assume the chicken came first. It mutated to chicken outside the egg? Possibly. But wouldn't it require 2 mutations? Imagine a factory producing factories producing factories.
This one produces purple factories with it's algorithm. Suddenly a glitch occurs and it starts producing green factories. Wait, IT turns green at the SAME time.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
What deeper motivation caused the first poultry based organism to embark on that journey across the road?
Even most of the people who don't believe in evolution accept the idea that you can cross-breed animals to get different animals - which is part of why we're calling them "chickens" as opposed to various kinds of jungle fowl. (Not that the folks who did that crossbreeding were necessarily that picky about what kind of domesticated birds they had.)
But there are always logic-deficient people around - they're called "children", and questions like this are part of how they learn logic.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Whoosh! And monkeys are pretty good at making immense leaps, and as their smarter descendants, we can make immense leaps through mental processes alone, without requiring springy tree branches to help! (Not sure if that applies to "monkies" or "Monkees", though...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
are you saying that something that was born not a chicken became a chicken in the course of its life?
Very interesting article, but I am not really convinced. Taking an example (not a good one by any means) from CS, as far as I know, Unix is written in C and C was developed on Unix. But C could have been developed on any OS and Unix could be written in any language... existence of C does not guarantee Unix came first... both of them initially came out of assembly language. Similarly the ovocledidin-17 might have come out independently through other evolutionary mechanism.
Does a "chicken egg" mean "an egg that will grow into a chicken" or "an egg laid by a chicken"? That's a language question, not a scientific one.
Even if it's the former, how much does the egg reflect the mother's genetics as opposed to the child's? Is the fertilized cell growing into the entire egg, using nutrients from the mother's body, or is most of the egg produced by the mother's body with the fertilized cell only contributing the bits in the middle that grow into the new chicken? And do the differences between jungle fowl and chickens affect the eggs, or are they in other parts of the bird?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's the first good argument I've heard for that position...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Personally I've always believed that from a Darwinist point of view the only logical explanation is that the Egg comes first. From the summary of the story they're making it sound like, it it lays eggs then it's a chicken, which is not always the case. The truth is that genetically you usually have mutations before being born, so any creature that laid an egg (or even without eggs, e.g. mammal) gave birth to to a mutant freak that so happened to be a chicken.
If dianasour laid eggs, Can we change the question to what came first Egg or the Dianasour???
LMFAO....I can't believe people are arguing about what came first. For me both are tasty...:)
The chicken came first because it is an actuality while the egg is only a potentiality. The same reasoning means that the rights of the human should always be put before the unborn human. Don't try to explain this to conservatives, it will just make them angry.
Really? You are absolutely certain you are correct and anyone else is either logic deficient or a religious crazy?
To everyone who isn't massively close minded, I posit that is would be possible that, the first creature that we would have identified as.... 'yup, that's a chicken', could have been born without the benefit of an egg. Or, the egg could have predated such a 'first chicken', with the precursor to the chicken already having egg-laying capability.
Anyway, the point of any such 'chicken and egg' debate isn't about the chicken or the egg. It's about applying reason to a problem as an exercise in reason.
Now, if you will excuse me, I think I'm just going to pop into my time machine and find out if the first egg-laying chicken-like creature does, in fact, taste like chicken.
The egg came first. No doubt about it.
Virtually everyone, but clueless science journalists, knows that dinosaurs were laying eggs tens of millions of years before there were chickens.
Need more be said?
No, you're not correct. First of all, chickens might have originated by natural selection in an isolated bunch of jungle fowl, or alternatively they might have originated from human-directed cross-breeding between different types of jungle fowl, with two different not-quite-chicken parents.
And more importantly, while evolution is mostly about small changes over long periods of time, there's still some point where you draw the line and decide that the child is a different species. Doesn't bother Darwin any, nor does it bother the chicken.
If a chicken evolves in a forest, and nobody's there to see it, does it still make a sound?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'll leave the question of when birds evolved from dinosaurs to people who actually know what they're talking about. But chickens are far more recent, around 7-10000 years ago, evolving or being crossbred from various kinds of jungle fowl.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The important bits look to be "this is how the proteins and stuff work that allow development of hard eggshells in domestic chickens."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Was it actually evolution or human-guided crossbreeding of various chicken ancestors? We can't tell at the moment, and history doesn't appear to have recorded it for us. (That's not always clear - we keep hearing cases like "Scientists discover new mammal species in Indonesia! Then they discover specimens of it for sale in village market. Locals say 'was tasty'.") That mutation may not have happened in the gametes of the either parents of the first chicken; it could have just as well have occurred in one of that chicken's ancestors.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It certainly makes it a more interesting question, but that doesn't mean everybody's talking about the same thing,
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Ancient Greeks had all kinds of notions about the origins of the current state of the world. While Darwin's theories about the origin of species through natural selection weren't part of them, that doesn't mean that there weren't some Greeks who thought the world was always changing and others who thought that it was always the same and others who had more complex alternative ideas.
However, your argument that the first egg-laying animal came before the first egg is at least interesting. It doesn't apply to chickens per se, or even to birds, but it's a pretty good argument, and is probably even correct, though enough weird stuff has evolved in the last few billion years of biology that it's not necessarily so.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, pretty much - or at least like free-range chicken as opposed to tasteless inbred underexercised factory-farm chickens.
As far as I know, I've never eaten Jungle Fowl, but chickens in Hawaii do mix with them enough that it's possible I had some on my first trips over there (before I was vegetarian.) I've probably had eggs that were more jungle fowl than chicken, but you can't really tell unless you know who collected them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
:;
Chickens appear to have ancestors in several different kinds of jungle fowl in Asia, and there's a good chance that they became chickens because of humans breeding them together as opposed to having already been chickens when Man showed up and domesticated them.
I'd highly recommend that you go read Francis Collins's book "The Language Of God", about how genetics works. He's one of the Human Genome Project folks, and Christian. I found the book somewhat disappointing - he found Christianity through the basic C.S.Lewis type of search for meaning in the world, and doesn't really relate his faith much to his genetics work, but it's a good starting point on genetics, and on how deeply genetics and evolution are wrapped together, and on how it's perfectly possible to believe both.
And the meaning of the Bible changes all the time, as we learn more about the cultures the writers were living in and therefore about what the things they wrote would have meant to the people hearing them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If an egg is identical to a chicken egg, is it a chicken egg even though its mother was probably a Red Jungle Fowl? Their eggs are pretty much identical except for having embryos of slightly different birds inside, and there's more variation between chicken eggs than between the average chicken egg and the average jungle fowl egg.
And creationists may argue that it was a product of crossbreeding between previously created species of birds that all pretty much taste like chicken and have eggs that taste like chicken eggs, but aren't the same as domestic chickens.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Surely you don't think that political event reporting follows a different process, do you? (Except for the cases where the reporter or editor has a specific partisan bias, of course - I'm just talking about the cases where the reporter is *trying* to say something accurate, and when the politician wasn't deliberately lying or more clueless than average.)
Think about any event you've been at which you also saw reported in the news. Are events that you weren't at likely to have been reported any more accurately? And think about the accuracy of typical eyewitness reports (which includes your own, of course...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tasted like chicken...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I suppose it's probably better than facepalming while holding a chicken....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The paper's abstract is actually about how the proteins work that let hard eggshells form.
The mothers of the first chickens were probably Red Jungle Fowl or related birds, and they're not significantly more dinosaur-like.
And there's no reason to assume natural selection based evolution here - it's more likely to have been human-guided crossbreeding between partially domesticated birds of several related species.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
C: A chicken egg is an egg identical to the kinds of eggs laid by chickens - but it still could have been laid by a jungle fowl. (Egg wins.)
D: A "Chicken" and an "Egg" are categories because humans named them, and humans have been around longer then chickens (which probably evolved from human-domesticated jungle fowl about 7-10,000 years ago), but bird eggs have been around and interesting to humans a lot longer, so we probably named the egg category before we named the chicken category. "Hey, Fred, your birds look a bit different than the jungle fowl the rest of us have - what do you call them?"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The chicken could have also come from crossbreeding chicken-like birds, not necessarily from mutations. "Egg" still came first, though.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
O.K. Steven Hawking proved the Big-Bang...the "ever-expanding universe & all...he says the Creator made it happen... But he also says it's not where we came from or where we're going...It's about what we do with what we got... I'll take bacon, busicuts & gravy with those eggs... Thank You!
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
I always thought it was the rooster who came first.
What would have happened is that a dinosaur laid an egg that hatched a chicken which then laid an actual chicken egg that hacked another chicken.
Typoos are a bitch, aren't they?
Free Martian Whores!
This all depends on how you define egg. Is it the egg that the first "chicken" came out of, or the first egg a "chicken" laid?
I would argue that the egg came first, because at some point, a creature that was genetically different enough to not be considered a chicken laid an egg, and out of that egg came something that we consider a chicken. Therefore, the egg came first - the first egg that a chicken came out of - the first chicken-egg.
They are Duck Eggs .....
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