What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Tekkip20@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

I think the egg came first because in order for the chicken to even exist and evolve to its current state, it would need to be first hatch only BY THEN it becomes the famous clucking bird we know and love.

Checkmate chicken-ists your move?

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cattywampas@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The egg came first. Mutations happen in the production of gametes, or sex cells, so a proto-chicken would have produced a slightly mutated egg that turned out to be a chicken.

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- TheFogan@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Accurate, but of course the real thing to note is in evolution, our lines and definitions of what a chicken is… is especially undefined. we just draw the line and call a particular creature a chicken… which is significantly more similar to the proto-chicken than a modern chicken is.
  
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  - Auntievenim@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Dinosaurs laid eggs, and chickens did not come before dinosaurs. Eggs came first.
    
    Its that simple
    
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- SassyRamen@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I’ve always just answered with: “One day the egg that was laid hatched into a chicken.”
  
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vvilld@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.

Modern chickens didn’t exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.

But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a ‘chicken’ laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.

The egg absolutely came first.

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- NABDad@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Ah, but is a chicken egg a chicken egg because it came out of a chicken or because a chicken comes out of it?
  
  That is the real question.
  
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  - sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    This problem seems very similar to the impossibility of measuring a coastline accurately.
    
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danhab99@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

The egg… laid by a bird that wasn’t a chicken

Neil D Tyson

The explanation goes as follows:

Since any offspring is never going to be 100% genetically similar to its parent, eventually an offsprings genome will mutate into what we humans would classify as a chicken within our “scientific” definitions.

Imo the concept of a chicken is an illusion. It’s a bird thing that I can eat, and sometimes they’re really nice and lay eggs, that’s what a chicken is.

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FelixCress@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Eggs at the morning, fried chicken for dinner so eggs come first. That was the question, right?

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TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
the chicken and the egg are laying in bed sharing a post-coital cigarette.

the chicken says, “Well I guess that answers that question.”

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y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Eggs existed for millions of years before chickens, why is this still a debate?

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- rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think there’s an implicit “chicken” before the egg: what was first, a chicken or a [chicken] egg?
  
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I answer it with evolution, so the egg probably came first, and the first chicken came from an egg laid by something very close to, but not quite, a chicken.

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JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
According to Last-Thursdayism, both came at the same time - last Thursday, when the universe was created

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Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This conversation has been swirling since forever, and the answer is that both came first

It really comes down to the fact that we have arbitrary scientific conventions, and we have to slot everything into its little hole

It is impossible to make the determination, outside of the human perspective, which came first

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Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
In one sense, the egg. Animals had been laying eggs for millions of years before anything like a chicken evolved.

If we’re limiting our scope to just chicken eggs though, things get a little murkier.

When we talk about chicken eggs, are we talking about eggs laid by a chicken, or are we talking about eggs from which a chicken can hatch? Or do both need to be true for it to truly be a chicken egg?

In the first and last case, the chicken obviously needs to come first, a non-chicken can’t lay a chicken egg if that’s the criteria you’re going by.

That middle ground though is interesting.

The chicken is descended from the red junglefowl. Look up some pictures, they’re pretty damn chicken-y, I might even say they may look even more like a chicken than some modern chicken breeds. If I was out walking around and a junglefowl ran across the street in front of me, I’d probably chuckle to myself while I pondered the age-old question of “why did the chicken cross the road?” If one showed up in my friends’ backyard flock of assorted chicken breeds, it wouldn’t look at all out of place.

But it is not a chicken.

Chickens, however, are junglefowl. We consider them to be a subspecies of junglefowl- Gallus gallus domesticus

Chickens did not emerge in a single instant. It took many years of selective breeding and evolution for the modern chicken to come into being. Countless generations of junglefowl gradually becoming more chicken-y until the modern chicken emerged.

At one point in time, a bird was hatched that checked all of the boxes for us to call it a chicken instead of a junglefowl. The egg it hatched from was laid by a bird that was just on the other side of the arbitrary line from being a chicken. Unless you sequenced the two birds genomes you would probably be pretty hard-pressed to say which was the chicken and which was the junglefowl.

So the first chicken hatched from an egg said by a junglefowl.

However, that is one true chicken in a flock of not-quite-chickens. Odds are that chicken did not breed with another true chicken, but instead one of those near-chicken junglefowl. So its eggs would not hatch into a true chicken, but instead a chicken-junglefowl hybrid.

And there was probably a long period of time where things teetered on that line, the occasional true chicken hatched, and then laid eggs that hatched into non-chickens, those non-chickens getting closer and closer to the line over many generations.

Until finally it happened. Two true chickens bred, and lay an egg that also matches into a true chicken. The first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken.

But again you’d be pretty hard pressed to pinpoint which bird that was in the flock. It was probably a wholly unremarkable bird that looked pretty much the same as all of the chickens and non-chicken junglefowl around it.

The lines we draw separating different species and subspecies are pretty arbitrary. It’s more for our convenience to categorize things than it is to reflect any absolute truth about the animals around us. That line could have been drawn just about anywhere in the history of chickens and it would still be valid.

There’s also potentially a nature vs nurture angle here. Chickens are social creatures who raise their young, they’re not running on pure instinct, to some extent they learn how to be a chicken from other chickens. A true chicken raised by junglefowl may act more like a junglefowl than a chicken in some ways, and vice versa. Is that important when determining what the bird is? When the differences between them are so small, I think it might be. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

So there’s perhaps an argument to be made that maybe the first true chicken didn’t appear until at least a generation or two after that first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken. After all, if the young aren’t being raised by and around other chickens, maybe they’re not really chickens.

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superkret@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s a language question, not a biological one.
The answer is “depends on your definition of chicken and egg”.
“Chicken” isn’t a thing that exists in nature, it’s a category humans assign to some birds.

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- Mjorfin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is the correct answer.
  
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- WheelcharArtist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  are you drunk?
  
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  - superkret@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I mean… yes, but how could you tell?
    
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guy@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
That's a statement not a question

Anyway, the hen came first which then traveled back in time to lay the egg first, so it then could hatch into the chicken.

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hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Eggs predate chickens. Chicken eggs evolved simultaneously with chickens. There was no first chicken, nor first chicken egg.

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- RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s not how evolution works. The chicken egg did come before the chicken, because that’s where mutations occur.
  
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  - hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    No, that is 100% not how evolution works. No individual has ever laid an egg of a different species. One mutation doesn’t make a non-chicken a chicken. Chickens evolved from their ancestors slowly over many many generations. It’s like how you can’t change one word and make a language a different language, but if you change enough words, it becomes a different language.
    
    Let me put it another way. If you take a modern chicken back in time 10,000 years, it could probably breed with a chicken from then. But if you take it back maybe 20,000 years, maybe it can’t breed with a chicken from then. But if you take the chicken from 10kya, it could breed with the chicken from 20kya. So are they all the same species? Are they different species? Are they all chickens?
    
    Humans like to put things in little boxes with clear delineations, but that’s not how nature works. Species don’t come to be from one mutation. They evolve as the accumulation of many many mutations over many many generations. There’s no point at which you can say that child is a different species than their parent.
    
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  - loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    But chicken are the same species as their wild counterpart, the red jungle fowl. And there’s such a diversity of them, some may be more closely related to a wild jungle fowl than to another variety of domestic chicken. Therefore, it seems to me that what defines a chicken (as opposed to a jungle fowl) isn’t a specific genetic mutation, but the fact that it’s domesticated. And it seems to me that capturing a live jungle fowl would’ve been easier than hatching an egg you’ve harvested. The fowl that first laid an egg in captivity may thus already be considered a chicken, although it was born a red jungle fowl, hatched from a red jungle fowl’s egg; and only then it laid the first chicken’s egg.
    
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rational_lib@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The chicken came first. Chicken-ness begins at conception.

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BmeBenji@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The chicken. When it decided to cross the road

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charonn0@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Define “chicken”

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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Trust me, when it comes down to chickens, the chickens always come first.

Why? Because they are vicious little buggers, and if you try to make them wait they will eat you.

"Oh, hello monkey, is that a treat for me in your hand? How lovely, nom nom nom. What? I took your finger with the lovely dried bug? So sorry. Oh, hello monkey, is that an open wound in your hand for me? Nomnomnom. What? I’m not supposed to devour the flesh from your bones? So sorry. Oh, hello monkey, is that a bone sticking out from where your finger used to be…

You get the idea.

So, I ban say with authority that if the egg had come first, the chicken would have eaten it.

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