• Question: what came first, the chicken or the egg

    Asked by small to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 23 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by calamm8.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hello again small, think we’ve done this one before. I think some great minds have decided the egg must have come first because the chicken must have evolved from some other egg-laying creature slightly different to a chicken.

      Personally, i think this kind of argument descends into boring semantics unless you are very careful or very clever.

      Have you got a strong opinion you want to voice?

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Egg!

      Reptiles almost exclusively lay eggs and I think it’s still the consensus view that birds evolved from dinosaurs (which were reptiles!).

    • Photo: Emma Pilgrim

      Emma Pilgrim answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      A good philosophical question which could keep me pondering for hours. Tricky one that. I am going to say a form of chicken which evolved into producing eggs to protect its developing offspring. What about you?

    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      Hi small,

      I’m going to cheat shamelessly here, as I saw an answer to a similar question elsewhere on I’m A Scientists – the answer is the egg came first, but it wasn’t a chicken egg 🙂

      In evolutionary development, animals had eggs before there were birds – including chickens.

      Of course, this is a cop-out, because you wanted to know whether chicken eggs came before chickens! And I suspect that the answer to this is that it’s the wrong question! That’s always a good way to make someone stop and think who asks a seemingly impossible question 😉

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