Which came first – the chicken or the egg?
Collis School year 2 from Surrey and Sarah Ahmed from Lancashire (age 5-14)
Tom Bingham from Bedfordshire (age 5-14)
Rebecca from Cumbria (Age: 5-14)
Beth Watson from County Durham (Age: 5-14)
Johanna James from Tyne and Wear (Age: 25-34)
2-5 Junior Science class KES (Soton) from Hampshire (Age: 5-14)
Ashleigh Pinder from Stockton on Tees (Aged 5-14)
Sonia Mansouri from Stockton on Tees (age 5-14)
Esme Bloomfield from Stockton on Tees (Aged 5-14)
Dean Woodyatt from Somerset (Age 5-14)
Lucy croft from Suffolk (Age: 5-14)
Ashling Lauren Staunton from Kent (age 5-14)
Poppy and Tilly from Hertfordshire (age 5-14)
Jack Shurety from Northamptonshire (Age: 5-14)
Jeremy from Hertfordshire (age 5-14)
What was first, the duck or the egg?
Jas from West Midlands (age 5-14)
Filed under: Animals Big Questions, Answered Big Questions, Becky Poole's Big Answers, Biology Big Questions, age 5-14
On contemplating this and wondering why I hadn’t thought to answer this before, I decided it was the egg. There were egg laying dinosaurs roaming this earth before birds and as birds evolved from these, the egg must pre-date the chicken i.e. the parent that laid the egg of the first chicken wasn’t a chicken.
The domestic chicken is a descendent of a south east asian pheasant called a jungle fowl. So the egg came first but it came from a jungle’s fowl.
In order to consider this question, we first have to assume that the theory of evolution is true. If we can assume that, then it only takes a few steps to show that it is indeed the egg which comes first.
If evolution is true, then there must have been a time when there were no chickens. Evolution takes place as a result of mutations to offspring. Mutations cannot take place on living things, but only on their children. In this case, the thing which can be shown to be a “chicken” must have come from an egg, the parents of which were not chickens, as such.
So, some things which were not chickens gave birth to an egg, which opened up to reveal the very first chicken. This chicken then went on to be quite successful, and other mutations died out.
It is quite logical to say that if one believes that evolution is true, then it stands to reason that the egg came first.
But if the chicken came from another creature’s egg…still where did that creature come from? It did evolve into a chicken so technically they are the same animal.
This may be a quesion without an answer. The only way to really answer it is to go back in time to where the first living creatures appeared on Earth.
What all these answers is missing is the point of the question; to say that the egg was laid by something that was not a chicken but evolved is dodging the real question.
The follow-up question would be:
Which came first, the dinosaur or the egg?
but which came first the dinosaurs or eggs?
According to the creationist point of view, the CHICKEN came first. God created the chicken on Day 6 of creation. So if you believe in creation it was the chicken.
The chicken
If the theory of Creation is true, then the chicken! If the theory of Evolution is true, good luck figuring this one out!
I think the chicken came first because long long long ago chickens where there but eggs where probebly not around as much as it is now. so the chicken is my best answer the same as my dad’s!
According to the Bible, the chicken came first because in Genesis 2:19 it says that Adam named all of the fowl of the air and the beasts on the earth, but never about anything on eggs. And anyways, the first mention of eggs in the bible is Deuteronomy 22:6. Thats my PROOF of which came first.
i agree that if chickens were to evolve from a dinosaur-like creature which held similiar DNA then the dinosaur is technically a chicken itself. as someone said there was a first “true chicken” but that is never the case as 1000 years from now the dna from a modern chicken would be different still and so on and so forth so there is no “true chicken” as everything is constantly evolving somewhat. therefore we must resort back to the amoeba-like creature that first held the DNA capable of chicken-like traits in the future. and as we can ALL agree an amoeba is certainly incapable of laying an egg and thus that single amoebas parent was nothing more than a cell that divided (not an egg laying cell mind you). where that first cell came from no one can ever truely know but as for the chicken it is definitely not the egg that came first.
The egg came first. The chicken had to come from somewhere durr ^_^
The chicken (and eggs) have both evolved. But the egg as an invention is much older then the chicken form. Fish lay eggs. Reptiles have eggs. The current chicken and the egg are very different then what they used to be, but before there was something recognisable as a chicken, there were already eggs. Only after a certain time did some dinosaurs appear with feathers (and a beak, etc).
So the egg was first.
If you define a ‘chicken’ as the ancestor of the chickens we now have, and you basically ask ‘what came first, the offspring, or the parent?’ then the answer is that there used to be no difference between the offspring and the parent. It was a simple cell mitosis (the chicken and the egg are both inventions of the DNA).
If you want to take it to extremes, then you could argue that the first RNA strains which start life had no parents, so that the creature (the chicken) came first.
Creationism explains nothing. To just asume that Gaia and Uranus (because why would the Greek creation myth be any more false than genesis?) created all live is simply replacing a valid question with a aswer that gives no answers at all and only comes up with new questions, such as how Yahweh was created. Or why she waited a eternity before creating the earth.
way to go Thomas age 17 i totally agree.
Creationists need not assume that their beliefs preclude evolution from also being true. G-d could have created all the original life forms, including their ability to evolve (according to a divine plan — His intelligent design). Any time one makes an assumption about what the Bible says, one is not interpreting it literally (literal interpretation is probably impossible). Wouldn’t a way to honor G-d be to look at what appears to be true (what science tells us), to fill in the missing information in the Bible, and interpret the Bible to make it align with what appears to be true? Just because the Bible says that G-d created the animals, why assume that He created all current animals on the Sixth Day? That is a human assumption. And why not assume that G-d created eggs on the the Sixth Day? Just because Genesis doesn’t mention eggs doesn’t mean that G-d didn’t do it. Genesis leaves most details out of the text, and assuming that eggs weren’t there, is making an assumption without any proof from the text one way or the other. Evolution would dictate that at some point there was a creature that had enough chicken-like traits that a line could be drawn, and we’d call it a chicken. That creature came from an egg. If you believe that the creature’s parent could also qualify as a chicken, then go further back in that creature’s lineage — but wherever one draws the line, at some point one is at a chicken-like creature that came from an egg. Go back far enough, and it is no longer a chicken. The answer would seem to be: the egg.