well.... I guess that's that

There actually isn't really an answer.

First we'll assume that it is "Which came first the chicken or the chicken egg," because eggs were around a long time before birds.

Once this is established, it is just how people decide to define things. Is a chicken egg a chicken egg because it was laid by a chicken or because it has an undeveloped chicken fetus inside of it?

Do you see where I'm going with this or should I explain further?

EVOLUTION BITCHES!

Do you people not realize the origin of this question is merely just a test of faith as compared to logical reasoning?


Religious people tend to say the chicken came first as God placed the chicken.


Scientific reasoning seems to show the egg came first because the reasonable explanation seems to be that birds, related to chickens, used evolution and a large amount of time to create what we now know is the chicken.

hey-oh, chicken on a raft.

this was pretty obvious to me at a young age.
even before i knew about evolution and such
i never understood why people didnt get this

The egg has been around since male/female reproduction came about through evolution some time shortly before the Cambrian explosion. Eggs with protective shells came about through reptiles. At some point a reptilian proto-bird with a strong resemblance to a reptile laid an egg with a genetic structure differing enough from its predecessor that it was more bird than reptile - this happened for generations until there was a line where one was not a bird, but one was.

So, the bird egg came before the bird, because it was laid by a animal that was not defined as a true bird. There had to have been, at some point, a clear threshold that differentiated the one specie from the other.

That is why the egg comes before the bird. Same thing with the chicken, except the modern chicken comes from the hybrid offspring of the red and grey junglefowl, however; the same process applies, there was at one point a non-chicken laying an egg that birthed a true chicken.

Well, the chicken's mother would have been a chicken. The difference between the two organisms would be the same difference between you and your mother, practically no difference, other than your gender. Nothing species changing. When we talk about evolution we're talking about thousands of extremely minor changes, one after another, that accumulate after thousands of years to create a different species, but the before and after are only different when the after is compared to a before that lived long ago, not when compared to a before that is its direct relative.

It's like this: who you are right now is basically the same as who you will be tomorrow. But who you will be next year is very different from who you are now, not necessarily because you suddenly woke up one day and said "I'm fucking different as hell today," (which is possible, but it doesn't happen very much.) but because you changed in unnoticeably small increments. As a large amount of days bearing unnoticeably small increments combine to form a year, those small increments also combine to form a drastic difference.

It all just depends on what you're comparing on the line. When comparing offspring and progenitors, they will almost always be the same species, but when comparing an organism that is indirectly related to one that lived several thousand years ago, they will almost always be different species.

So, kind of, yeah, what Neil said. It depends on where you draw the line between chicken and protobird.

THEN WHAT WAS THE BIRD BEFORE THE CHICKEN AND WHEN DID THE TRANSITION FROM PRE CHICKEN TO CHICKEN BEGIN!?

What if the chicken was born

I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS!

Was a scientist really needed to tell people this ? I figured this out in 3rd grade.

Fish laid eggs before anything lived on land.

Didn't they discover some substances in the egg shell that can only be produced in the body of the hen ?
Or m I just remembering it wrong.

MFW he says something I though of :D

so where did that bird come from?