-
Asked by yuliya to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 7 Nov 2015.
-
Florence McCarthy answered on 7 Nov 2015:
Good question, for me it has to be the egg, as any new species has to be formed from something (a pre-chicken??) and Darwin would say that the chicken adapted to its surroundings to flourish so the egg had to come first.
-
-
Neil Day answered on 7 Nov 2015:
The egg can only exist if it was produced from a chicken, therefore I would say the chicken comes first. The chicken evolved over time from a species of dinosaur, so at some point the modern day chicken we know was created and then….it laid an egg!
-
Sinead Balgobin answered on 11 Nov 2015:
A philospher! From a scientific point of view, some people think that the egg came first, because a chicken must come from a chicken egg, and animals do not evolve over their lifetime. The modern chicken would have first existed inside its egg. However! Other scientists claim that to make a chicken egg with a shell like the ones we have today, you need specific proteins that are only found in the ovaries of a chicken- so the chicken must have come first to be able to make the egg have a shell just like the ones we have today.
I think I would agree with the first answer, because lots of different animals have eggs, so a chicken ancestor might have been able to make the protein to make a chicken egg, which housed the chicken before it was born. Evolution is tricky to understand because a species doesn’t just change with the birth of one new animal- there have to be lots of them to change in the same way before they have really evolved. You don’t evolve just in a single lifetime either- it takes generations of animals or plants with the best features surviving and reproducing to make a new adaptation stick.
Comments