• Question: Has is been scientificaly proven what came first, the chicken or the egg?

    Asked by becca0612 to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 14 Mar 2013:


      Probably not, there is one way of looking at it where you could say the egg came first, but its probably more complicated than that. If you had to choose one then you would have to say egg not chicken though.

      In birds the female ones have egg cells and the male ones have sperm cells, each of these cells have half the DNA that will make the new baby bird. Sometimes when these cells are being made there is a mistake in the DNA, this is called a genetic mutation and if this cell is used to make the baby then the baby will have this mutation in all of its cells, so this might mean that it looks a bit different or has something different on the inside. It can then have babies and pass on the mutation too, if it’s a good mutation then it will spread so that eventually all of those types of animals have the mutation. This is how evolution works, if there are quite a lot of these mutations that spread then eventually the bird that you have will be different enough from the original one that you would call it a different species.

      So for chickens you would need to find the first thing that would be what you would call a chicken, this would have come from an egg, so the egg came first. Because its mum that layed the egg would not have been the same species as a chicken.

      However its a bit more difficult than this because the build up of mutations happen very slowly over a very long period of time so very gradually, so it would be impossible to pick out the first thing that was a chicken anyway!

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:


      Difficult question, but I think it is it a bit more complicated than just the chicken or the egg, as chickens have evolved from other stages of life…so really, neither of those came first, but something else entirely!

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