Which came first

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Share Twitter Pinterest Email. Definitions and Climate Change. Archaea vs. Bertrand Russell argued that the very argument contradicts itself. If every event must have a preceding cause, he argued, then the very idea of a first cause would be contradictory. Which came first, actual chickens or actual eggs? At this juncture, scientific evidence allows us to solve the problem. The answer, it turns out, is the egg.

Modern birds evolved from small, carnivorous dinosaurs. The first intermediate species between birds and therapods, such as Archaeopteryx , lived during the late Jurassic, and the true ancestor of birds probably arrived during the late Cretaceous.

As such, the egg must have come first. What we really want to know is: Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg? Even phrased liked this, the egg wins out. Chickens have a labyrinthine genealogy. Its primary progenitor includes the red junglefowl Gallus gallus , but scientists have identified other species that bred with G.

One of them, the grey junglefowl of southern India, is thought to have given the modern chicken its yellow skin — leaving scientists befuddled as to whether chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia before spreading outward, or if their progenitors were domesticated in several locations before being brought together. Either way, the chicken lineage is one of many wild and domesticated fowl being interbred.

One of these eggs housed an offspring with DNA mutations, resulting in what we would consider the first chicken. The Egg — laid by a bird that was not a Chicken[.

We know that life on Earth came to be through a process called evolution and that the Earth accreted from rocks and debris orbiting the Sun and that the Sun formed when gravity pulled in immense amounts of dust and gas together and that the universe sprang forth from a high-density, high-temperature state.

As such, children and philosophers can still get mileage out of the chicken-and-egg problem. They just need to tweak the wording a bit. Symposiacs Book II: Question 3. The University of Adelaide Library. Last updated Dec.

Retrieved on Aug. Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press; Oxford. The origin of birds. The result? The first true chicken.

So who were the likely parents of this first One True Chicken? The red junglefowl Gallus gallus is native to a range of south-eastern Asian countries including India, southern China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the red junglefowl was first domesticated some 10, years ago, although DNA analysis and mathematical simulations suggest that the domestic chicken actually diverged from junglefowl much earlier an estimated 58, years ago.

This claim came from some researchers studying how chicken eggshells form. Hens get their supply of calcium for eggshell production from dietary sources calcium-rich seafood shells, such as oyster or prawn shells, are a popular snack for backyard hens for this reason.

One such protein, called ovocleidin or OC for short , is only found in the ovary of a chicken, leading to the suggestion that the chicken must have come before the chicken egg, since without OC, there can be no chicken egg formation.

Interestingly, it seems that this protein is responsible for speeding up the rate of eggshell formation, enabling hens to build an egg from scratch and lay it within a hour timeframe. So, can we lay this age-old conundrum to rest? Or are scientists and philosophers still scrambling to find an answer?

At the end of the day, the question is something of a false dichotomy. Science can help us find the answer.