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."

Comments

Article is flawed. Egg came first.

[brunes69]

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.

Actually, here science and the Bible agree.

[koelpien]

Actually, if this theory is indeed true, science and the Bible agree on this one. Genesis says that God created the birds of the air, not eggs that later hatched into birds.

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?

Re:Actually, here science and the Bible agree.

[kainosnous]

Once again, the Bible was right. Sadly, science doesn't even agree with itself, so there are many who are going to disagree. Personally, I don't find this "evidence" to be particularly compeling, but then I'm no longer the blind faith in science type. Science will never prove anything conclusively because it's a game where they continually move the goal posts.

It boils down to this: God made chickens and those chickens laid eggs. If you believe in macro evolution (I do not), then it's just a type of heap paradox, and therefore subjective.

Bologna. It was the eggs.

[dmomo]

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.

Re:Nothing to do with the classic question...

[dargaud]

One of the most accurate, and depressing, summaries of the reality behind science reporting that I've ever seen.

I work in science labs, and the above is why half of scientists absolutely refuse to talk to journalists while the other half punches them on sight. The only time I did talk with them, I ended up on prime-time falling on my ass (slipping on ice, yup, that's the segment they kept).

Re:I thought this was already solved

[b4dc0d3r]

If you're implying that the egg came first, you're wrong, but not for the reason you might suspect. The question is not about evolution of eggs or chickens, and pre-dates evolutionary theory. Originally it was probably a metaphysical question, how do you have a chicken that lays eggs without either a chicken or an egg? It never was about timetables, it was about where do things come from if they don't exist?

"If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother -- which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg."

Aristotle, (Isis Unveiled I, 428.)
http://www.blavatsky.net/magazine/theosophy/ww/additional/ancientlandmarks/PlatoAndAristotle.html

With the your understanding, we can declare eggs the winner. But it still does not quell the anti-evolutionary forces which ask ok fine, which came first the dinosaur or the egg? The question can be rephrased for today's audience as: how do codependent traits arise? How can something irreducibly complex as the human visual system come from nothing?

We know the answers to those questions, roughly speaking, just as we knew the answer to this one. But we didn't have a concrete explanation of just how that happened.

In addition, the questino of chicken-egg primacy has always implied hard-shelled eggs, at least to my understanding. So reptiles and extinct species would not count. Hard shells came from the same place chickens did, at the same time, is the implication. Finding the protein means we have an explanation that hard shells are independent of an actual chicken. Many reptile species probably contain the ability to create this protein, but it is supressed or under-developed. Finding that would be the best way to put to rest anti-scientific rhetoric. The hard-shell egg probably came both before and after chickens, and we have just the one species left that has both chickenness and hard eggs.

An updated version of the question is asked and addressed here, along the lines of your thought, but this is merely grafting modern terminology onto an ancient question and making it a concrete, rather than abstract question:
http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue5_2/04_garner.html