• Question: In science, what came first - the chicken or the egg?

    Asked by pasha3 to Indi, Jarv, John, Ken, Vicky on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by pasha2, pasha1, pasha4, pasha5, pasha6, pasha7, tahirakhan.
    • Photo: John Prytherch

      John Prytherch answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Dinosaurs and other reptiles existed long before chickens (though I think dinosaurs might be closely related to birds? Someone else might know better….) and they laid eggs, so I’d say the egg came first 🙂

    • Photo: Indi Ghangrekar

      Indi Ghangrekar answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Ha ha, good answer John we need Vicky’s input, she’d be the best to comment on dinosaurs! But yes, weirdly I think there is some link between dinosaurs and birds. I know someone who keeps chickens in their garden and to watch them run it does not seem so odd, they do look like dinosaurs when they run.

      But because this is ‘I’m a scientist…’, I’m trying to think about it in evolutionary terms and I’m no evolutionary biologist but I’ll give it a try (but I may be wrong, I’m using my biology knowledge with a bit of guesswork based on real principles)! It would be chicken because, in evolution, the changes that take place in genes would be seen in an animal’s offspring, so the ancestor of the chicken would have had it’s offspring in whatever it was before it was laying of an egg. But that offspring (the chicken) would have something different in its genes that meant that it now laid eggs. For some reason, egg laying is better than what the ancestor was doing so the chicken race survived! I hope that makes some kind of sense?!

    • Photo: Vicky Young

      Vicky Young answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      I would say the egg came first! Simply because eggs were around millions of years before chickens. Eventually evolution would lead to a genetic mutation from an ancestor which would have turned the fetus in the egg into a chicken.

      Some fun info: Birds are descended from dinosaurs. There is a scientist Jack Horner in America who was the scientific adviser for Jurassic Park. He is currently doing research on chickens and is trying to reverse engineer a chicken into a dinosaur. Basically because dinosaurs are birds then they are ancestors of common birds today. So by taking a chicken and changing the genes to what they would have been millions of years ago you can in time turn a chicken back into a dinosaur. One of his motivations for doing this research is that he “wants a pet dinosaur”!

      This is a video of him talking about his research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVXdEOiCw8

      Its really cool!

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