Question: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

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  1. A tricky question!

    If you think from an evolutionary point of view the very first chicken will have hatched from an egg laid by something that was very similar to a chicken but not quite the same. That egg was the first chicken egg, because it was the first egg to contain a chicken. So the egg came first.

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  2. Hi Carley and Duffy – Thanks for all your great questions, keep them coming!

    My answer is: The egg

    Eggs were around a long time before chickens were, cause reptiles were the ones that “invented” the eggshell and the egg. And because reptiles were around long before chickens – that’s why I say the egg wins!

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  3. Thanks for your question, carley – definitely one of the trickiest questions around, and funnily enough I was discussing this with someone the other night! You can’t get a chicken without an egg, but you can’t get an egg without a chicken. As Lee suggests, the first chicken would have come from an egg from an animal that was like a chicken, but not the chickens we know today. So the animal in side that egg, would have been the first chicken. So the egg came first.

    I discussed this with a philosopher a few nights ago,who also knows something about evolution and it’s summarised here: http://twitpic.com/5c7iqi A way of looking at it is..You can have an almost-chicken first, producing an egg with a chicken. Or you can have a something non-egg producing a chicken. Which is more likely? The almost-chicken,or in the diagram, the non-chicken.

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