Scientific resolution
A simple explanation of why the egg came first was by Roy A. Sorensen in his one-page-article in 1992. He argued that although it is indeterminate which animal was the first chicken, the question of whether the chicken or the chicken egg came first has a determinate answer. Since an animal does not evolve into another species during its lifetime, and since organisms can fail to breed true, it is biologically necessary that the chicken egg came first.
[12]
Evolution changes species over time via
mutation and sexual reproduction. Since
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) can be modified before and after birth,
[13] it can be argued that a mutation must have taken place at conception or within an egg such that a creature similar to a chicken, but not a chicken, laid the first chicken eggs. These eggs then hatched into chickens that inbred to produce a living population.
[14][15] Hence, in this light, both the chicken and the structure of its egg evolved simultaneously from birds that, while not of the same exact species, gradually became more and more like present-day chickens over time.
However, no one mutation in one individual can be considered as constituting a new species. A
speciation event involves the separation of one population from its parent population, so that interbreeding ceases; this is the process whereby domesticated animals are genetically separated from their wild forebears. The whole separated group can then be recognized as a new species.
The modern chicken was believed to have descended from another closely related species of birds, the
red junglefowl, but recently discovered
genetic evidence suggests that the modern domestic chicken is a
hybrid descendant of both the red junglefowl and the
grey junglefowl.
[16] Assuming the evidence bears out, a hybrid is a compelling scenario that the chicken egg, based on the second definition, came before the chicken.
This implies that the egg existed before the chicken, but that the chicken egg did not exist until an arbitrary threshold was crossed that differentiates a modern chicken from its ancestors. Even if such a threshold could be defined, an observer would be unlikely to identify that the threshold had been crossed until the first chicken had been hatched and hence the first chicken egg could not be identified as such.
A simple view is that at whatever point the threshold was crossed and the first chicken was hatched, it had to hatch from an egg. The type of bird that laid that egg, by definition, was on the other side of the threshold and therefore not a chicken—it may be viewed as a proto-chicken or ancestral chicken of some sort, from which a genetic variation or mutation occurred that resulted in the egg being laid containing the embryo of the first chicken. In this light, the argument is settled and the 'egg' had to have come first. However, whether this was defined as a chicken egg or proto-chicken egg is debatable. So technically the egg came before the chicken, but the chicken may have come before the
chicken egg. So it depends on whether the question is "What came first, the chicken or the egg" or "what came first, the chicken or the
chicken egg".
Logically the final conclusion can be drawn that the egg indeed came before the chicken, as a bird that was not a chicken could accumulate germline mutations in a single sperm or ovum to produce the first genetically identifiable chicken, but a non-chicken egg is much less likely to produce a non-chicken which accumulates enough identical somatic cell mutations across its cells to create a chicken spontaneously.
Same deal with cells and cell aggregates .
