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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."
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.
Ask and ye shall receive... http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123506502/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fange.201000679
I dunno... dinosaurs laid eggs long before chickens roamed the earth.
Perhaps the egg shell developed as a result of a cookie setting error? Did chickens really eat cookies back then?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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.
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.
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]
The bit. This is all a simulation.
Ask and ye shall receive, from an Evolutionary Biologist, no less: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/chickens_eggs_this_is_no_way_t.php
(PS, the research says not what the article promotes)
This is mostly irrelevant. A "Chicken" is just a point in time of a particular leaf point in the tree of life. Whatever creatures that were part of that tree that laid the first "chicken" egg was still able to mate with the first "chicken". The point at which you call them "Chickens" is when they're no longer able to successfully mate (as a population) with other offshoots from the tree, or the original, larger, body.
There's no hard point at which one species changes into another (which will confound your average creationist, who are constantly asking for there to be a sharp division between ancestors and child species), it's a gradual process involving thousands of mutations over many generations. Whatever laid the first Chicken egg was still a chicken, and if you go back far enough, it wasn't a chicken, so much as it was the ancestral node in the tree of life's species.
See http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/chickens_eggs_this_is_no_way_t.php
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
What gave birth to that egg was not 100% chicken.. So Say I.
Yeah, but I bet still tasted like chicken.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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...