• Question: which comes first the chicken or the egg?

    Asked by 553smap44 to Sheila, Piyush, Natalia, Gary, Dimitar on 12 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Gary Munnelly

      Gary Munnelly answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      An age old question which I don’t know the answer to, but if I had to guess, I would say the egg. If we accept that evolution is a thing, then I guess it is possible that a creature which was not a chicken by the modern definition of the word laid an egg which resulted in a creature that hatched into a chicken.

      To be honest though, that explanation sounds naive and short-sighted even as I write it, so maybe ask your local evolutionary biologist for a better answer (then tell me what that answer is).

    • Photo: Dimitar Shterionov

      Dimitar Shterionov answered on 14 Nov 2018:

      There is no correct answer to this question or both of the answers are correct. I agree with Gary’s explanation.

      But it actually depends on how you define an egg and a chicken. I think this question actually asks what was first – the parent or the child – whether it is a bird, a snake, a platipus (all breading through laying eggs), a microorganism or a mammal.

      For me, first there were single-cell organisms that started dividing and step by step evolved into multi-cell organisms. Along this evolution process, one organism (or organisms group) evolved into procreating by producing egg-like offsprings and these evolved to having eggs.

      So, maybe I would say the chicken if I have to pick one of them…

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