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This particular philosophical question was shot down by geneticists quite some time ago.
The first chicken was created due to a mutation. Genome mutations occur during cell division, in eggs, and in the mitochondrial genome.
The first chicken hatched from the first chicken egg. Therefore, the egg came first.
Also eggs existed in other species long before chickens.
Surely a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken though, not an egg containing a chicken, otherwise unfertilised eggs wouldn't be chicken eggs.
If the mutation occurs in the creature inside the egg, then it makes sense to me that that's where the new species begins. The chicken came first 🤔
I'm going to stop saying chicken and egg now, it's getting ridiculous... 😁
The first chicken was created from a mutation of another species. That mutation occurred before the egg was completely formed, making it the first chicken egg. The first chicken wasn’t born until it hatched from that egg.
Therefore, there was a chicken egg before there was a chicken.
So, by this you say that that egg when the egg was first laid it was not a chicken egg, but after the mutation it became a chicken egg? How do you determine if an unhatched egg is a chicken egg then? At this point I think we're better off calling all eggs Schrodinger eggs, because we never know what they are until hatched.
Well, technically that’s true. Without analyzing a fertilized egg, we don’t know with certainty what the result will be.
For example, a woman could give birth to an albino without knowing before birth. Albinism is a mutation in the melanin production gene. The mutation forms in-utero. The equivalent to an in-utero mutation in an oviparous (egg-laying) animal would occur inside the egg.
So the direct ancestor of the chicken laid an egg that mutated into the first chicken egg, then the first chicken hatched from it.
But is chicken-ness actually defined by genetics? An important characteristic of a chicken is its domesticated status, if you consider the birds they descend from, they are remarkably similar, and it's hard to imagine that any one mutation would have been what caused people to start calling them by their own name or considering them as a separate species. It's possible that the first chicken became the first chicken when it was captured by humans, and so preceded the first chicken egg.
Yup. The domesticated chicken has changed quite a bit since domestication began, but the species is still a domesticated chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus). The primary ancestor of the domestic chicken, the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), birthed the first domesticated chicken between 7,000-10,000 years ago.
The way I heard it, the egg came first, it just wasn't a chicken egg