I’ve always just answered with: “One day the egg that was laid hatched into a chicken.”
Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?
cattywampas@lemm.ee 1 week ago
The egg came first. Mutations happen in the production of gametes, or sex cells, so a proto-chicken would have produced a slightly mutated egg that turned out to be a chicken.
SassyRamen@lemmy.world 1 week ago
TheFogan@programming.dev 1 week ago
Accurate, but of course the real thing to note is in evolution, our lines and definitions of what a chicken is… is especially undefined. we just draw the line and call a particular creature a chicken… which is significantly more similar to the proto-chicken than a modern chicken is.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Dinosaurs laid eggs, and chickens did not come before dinosaurs. Eggs came first.
Its that simple
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Every chicken is a dinosaur, but not all dinosaurs are chickens
TheFogan@programming.dev 1 week ago
ah yeah quite true, if the question is egg’s in general, then yeah, eggs existed before the first land walking creatures. I always assumed the question is meaning a chicken egg specifically. Of which the answer is still the same as, as assuming we as humans pick an arbitrary line to draw for being a chicken. Obviously before the first chicken exists, a creature just short of meeting the qualifications for a chicken, would have layed an egg of what we define as a chicken, to create the first “chicken”.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I always struggled with the question until I thought about the question itself. Once I realized I was being asked: what came first? The answer became clear
The question is an illusion, there is no chicken
treadful@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Another way to frame this is that, you can’t just magically create a singular being that’s a new species because it wouldn’t have anything to breed with. So it’s a long term gradual change of a complete population into what we know as a chicken today.