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Which Came First The Chicken Or The Egg

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The first recorded reference to the Chicken and Egg debate harks all the way back to ancient Greek philosophers when Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote:
"If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother -- which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg."

Since the chicken emerges from the egg, and the egg is laid by the chicken, it appears to be an ambiguous and circular question with no possible answer. However there might just be an answer...

Recently, a debate was commissioned by Disney to promote the release of the movie "Chicken Little" and the overwhelming opinion determined that the egg in fact came first.

According to Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics, because the organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would soon develop into, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the chicken species, would be this first egg.

Professor David Papineau, an expert in the philosophy of science, agreed with this opinion by suggesting that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens. He went on to argue that "it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it".

However is it possible that Professor Brookfield and Professor Papineau have actually missed a fundamental piece to the puzzle? If they argue that it is a chicken egg because it has a chicken in it, then they are forgetting about the very chicken they just confirmed was in the egg.

Thus, if there was a chicken inside the very first chicken egg then surely what they have done, is prove that the chicken and the egg arrived together, or at least very, very close to one another. The first chicken egg which developed through evolutionary mutation from something that was not quite a chicken must have actually contained a chicken.

Now the debate could be taken further; to consider the specifics of how chickens actually develop, starting from a zygote, becoming an embryo around which a shell forms as it in turn becomes a chicken.

Of course then we have to decide at which point the chicken actually changes from a developing embryonic life form into a little baby chick and whether this is before, during or after the protective membrane develops to become the shell.

This is a metaphorical "can of worms" in its own right, since we as a society still can't agree on when a human fetus actually becomes a living human baby.

Therefore, rather than get bogged down in moral debate over when life comes into being and what is and is not a baby chicken, I'll simply suggest that perhaps the most straight forward answer is that both the chicken and the egg arrived at the same time and leave it to the eggsperts to debate it further.




Benjamin Jones is an award winning author who co-owns Too-Write! a professional writing and editing website catering to professional resumes, web copy, business projects, assignments, cover letters and logo and website design.

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