Unofficial Poll- What comes first, the chicken, or the egg?

What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

  • The chicken!

    Votes: 21 38.9%

  • The egg!

    Votes: 16 29.6%

  • Other explanation

    Votes: 6 11.1%

  • I have no idea!

    Votes: 2 3.7%

  • The rooster?

    Votes: 9 16.7%
  • Total voters
    54
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Weeg said:
Sooo, if fungal fowl are ancient chickens which eggs evolved into chickens today, wouldn't that mean the chicken came first? But the egg had to create the jungle fowl, soooo, I'm confused! :lau
Click to expand...

Well this is a bit semantic but....
There was a long time ago something that was definitely not a jungle fowl. It layed eggs. And that was the great, great, great, great ^nth generation grandparent of a chicken. Since it layed eggs, the egg came first, because the egg existed but the chicken did not. Eggs literally evolved first.

But defining animals as a species is really tricky because it's not like going down a set of steps with clearly defined levels. It's more like a ramp. Where on the ramp do you stop and say "that was one step"? Where does the "not chicken" step end and the "chicken" step start on a ramp?

There's actually a lot of examples of this we can look at right now in nature. A great example is the crossbill finch. Crossbill finches are a relatively recent discovery and have gotten progressively more crossbeaked since they were discovered and the pine nuts they eat have gotten progressively thicker shells. But some of them still have relatively straight beaks that could just be considered a deformity in another species and they can reproduce with them freely.

Or how dogs and wolves can interbreed freely. If I breed my husky to a wolf are the offspring huskies or wolves? Well they're kind of both because there's not actually a clear step. And sometimes animals even move backwards in genetic steps. We have Bengal cats that are domesticated cats bred back to servals until we have a viable population. Human hair lice are a unique species but human genital lice are VERY closely related to ape lice. I'll let you ponder on what THAT information means for our ancestors behavior after having lost their body hair yourself.

So "What is a chicken" is like asking "where are we on a river?". There's no clearly delineated steps, even if the branches and path we took to get there are obvious and there are some big landmarks like "jungle fowl" and "Chicken". If you can't say what a chicken is exactly it's hard to know when we've crossed the threshold to "That egg hatched into a chicken".

But we DO know when something ISN'T a chicken *at all*. And we know that things that DEFINATELY weren't chickens came before chickens and were laying eggs. Therefore, the eggs 100% came first, even if we can't say what a chicken is.
 
ChocolateMouse said:
Well this is a bit semantic but....
There was a long time ago something that was definitely not a jungle fowl. It layed eggs. And that was the great, great, great, great ^nth generation grandparent of a chicken. Since it layed eggs, the egg came first, because the egg existed but the chicken did not. Eggs literally evolved first.
Click to expand...
No, I get it, the egg evolved to make the actual chicken breed today, but if you consider the question, what came first the thing that layed the egg, or the egg, which then evolves to become a chicken, then its different. I think that is more of the question that is being asked!
 

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