Eggs existed long before chickens.
A whole 51% the internet currently appears to agree. Phew.
A whole 51% the internet currently appears to agree. Phew.
> If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken
Species are assumed to produce eggs of the same species. Like many convenient turns of phrase, this isn't strictly true. What the egg contains (unless the egg casing is a relevant attribute) is how it is characterized.
A mutation exists in the developing embryo, so a non-chicken had a chicken-containing egg. This is a chicken egg, which necessarily came first. Looking at any given xenopregnancy (a hybrid Liger, or panda fetus in a cat, et al). The carrying species does not make the result of that species. eg If there was a non-chicken species (say, a turkey) which produced eggs that were genetically and practically identical to chicken-containing eggs, they would be called chicken eggs.
Viewed this way, what actually caused chickens to happen was the migration, not the genetics. It was the part where the two red junglefowl groups came out of genetic contact and started to diverge. On the assumption that these red junglefowl were adults (which is obvious if it was a migration, but merely likely if it was forced by humans), this means that a population of non-chickens was divided into two subpopulations, one of which was chickens, one of which wasn't.
So even agreeing that we should categorize the egg by the creature it produced immediately after hatching, you still get by this argument that a nonchicken egg hatched into a nonchicken which by circumstance became a chicken... Chickens came first, and then their chicken eggs.
Which egg?
Obviously "the egg that the chicken hatched from" came first, no one's debating that. But that's all you've said.
If the question is "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then it depends on whether the chicken egg is one that houses the chicken, or the one that is laid by a chicken.
Would you really argue that those eggs hatching into mules are not mule eggs?
I could see an argument that those eggs, coming out of canaries, could count as canary eggs, but not in a way that stops them from being mule eggs. "mule eggs" definitely needs to include the eggs that hatch into mules.
You could still debate if a non-chicken egg with chicken DNA is a chicken egg. Its shell and yolk, all contents, were produced by a non-chicken - imagine the eggshell was blue, not white, and the final allele change to become “chicken” switched the “egg color laid once grown” to white.
If all this eggs contents were produced by a genetically non-chicken - the egg is blue - is it really a “chicken egg”?
Imagine you took a chicken egg, and modified the DNA so that an elephant would hatch. Is this a “chicken egg (with elephant DNA)” or an “elephant egg (with shell, white, and yolk produced by a chicken)”?
Viewed your way, a chicken actually gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken that was finally the mother of an unbroken line of hens that survives to this day, some of whom had nonchicken fathers.
The problem is that the variation of the breeding population is much larger than the distance from the originals to the final result.
Those mutations happen at/inside the egg. At some point… little by little, two animals have an offspring that isn’t exactly like them.
The chicken egg came before the chicken that laid it. Some other animal laid it. And likewise the egg existed before the chicken inside it developed.
In no scenario that I can steelman does the chicken ever come first.
Another way to put it is that a chicken was once an egg, so even if "the chicken came first," that chicken was once an egg.
A chicken was once a fertilized egg cell, but an "egg" is the vessel that contains the zygote [1], and was created entirely by the mother (i.e. it is not a result of fertilization). So a chicken was once in an egg.
Consider the context before trying to correct people. You’re just being pedantic for no reason.
Many people in this thread are using the word "egg" in the same way as a female mammal releases an "egg" in estrus, i.e. the cell which will become an organism once fertilized. Hence the discussion elsewhere of how the mutation has already happened in this cell.
For instance, besides this thread, another person said "resulting in the very first chicken ever. Which of course started out as an egg.
I'm saying that a bird "egg", from the Wikipedia link, is not the gamete cell but rather simply the container, created by the mother.
So statements such as "[the chicken] started out as an egg" or "a chicken was once an egg" (your statement) are simply incorrect, just as saying "a human baby was once a uterus" is wrong.
It's not pedantic "for no reason" (at least any more than the rest of this by-definition pedantic discussion is).
And that's the best I can do. But it's silly, because that interpretation of the question has an extremely obvious answer, which implies that this is _not_ the intended meaning of the question -- if the structure of the question contains the required answer, then you wouldn't bother asking that question at all.
So we're right back at of course the bloody egg came first.
Anyone else want to take a shot?
To expand to dinosaurs, chickens, and Bronteroc's.
Assuming there's just chickens, and we're talking just about chicken eggs, then the chicken came first. Chickens need a mother to hatch the egg, to create the egg in it's womb, etc. An egg cannot exist without a mother to birth it.
I'm assuming that evolution would happen slowly over time, the creature that ended up becoming the chicken would have had to already been laying eggs. The egg laying feature would need to already be present for it to be our modern day preciously defined chicken.
The egg had to have come first
I don't think the question is about a fantasy world that only has chickens, and the chickens came from ????.
Just treat it as "chicken" vs. "chicken egg".