There are some questions, they are asked in every discussion, everyone gives different answers and in the end it becomes inextricable. Do such questions come to your mind? Yes, as you can understand from the title, we will look for an answer to the question “does the chicken come out of the egg or does the egg come from the chicken”. In fact, we will try to answer this question, which appears as a paradox, by considering it within the framework of science.
The reason this question is talked about so much is because it is a really difficult question. Because you need a chicken for an egg. The chicken also hatches from the egg. For this reason, a paradox emerges. Of course, when we approach this question from the framework of science, we can solve the things in our minds much more easily. For that, we can dig deep into evolutionary biology and figure out which came first.
Which came first: egg or chicken?
First of all, it is possible to clarify this issue very easily. The egg was something that existed long before the chicken. As you know, not only chickens lay eggs. Many animals already lay eggs. Eggs, which are technically based on trapping enough food for the embryo to survive and grow on its own in a shell, existed even when we went to the dinosaur era. Yes, the T-Rex, which would have shaken the ground under our feet with its gigantic size had it lived, was also an egg-laying creature. From this point of view, the egg existed long before the chicken. Considering that the eggs of birds evolved 150 million years ago, we can see more clearly that egg evolution cannot be compared to chickens.
We know that eggs are much older. However, let’s focus on the chicken and egg relationship without distracting our subject. Chickens exist in a relatively small time frame compared to eggs. The chicken, which is actually a domesticated animal, emerged as a result of humans choosing the least aggressive wild birds and allowing them to breed. It is estimated that this process, which started about 10,000 years ago, occurred at similar times in several different places.
Evolution from wild ancestors to chickens
When we look at the evolutionary process of the chicken, it is thought that its wild ancestor was a tropical bird that lived in the forests of Southeast Asia, often called the red forest bird. There are probably other forest bird species included in the genetic mix in addition to this bird.
Humans took the most domesticated red forest birds (Gallus gallus) and began to breed them. As a result of this separation, red forest birds evolved into a new subspecies. The new species was “Gallus gallus domesticus”, also known as chicken.
What do we say after all: Did the chicken come from the egg?
Yes, it is a definite fact that the chicken comes from the egg. At one point, an almost chicken-like creature transferred a small mutation in its genetic makeup to the egg. This egg also led to the emergence of the chicken we know. Of course, what we refer to as “at some point” didn’t actually happen at one point. Many small mutations came together and this happened over time.
A few years ago, a group of scientists discovered a protein that is essential for the formation of a chicken egg’s shell. This protein was only found in chicken ovaries. These data led to the findings that the chicken came before the egg. Because yes, the first chicken may have hatched from an egg, but this egg did not belong to a chicken. For an egg to belong to a chicken, there had to be a protein called OV-17. This phenomenon was not found very convincing, even by the scientists who discovered the protein. One of them described the question posed to him as “Fun but pointless”.
Yes, the chicken came from the egg.
OV-17 protein evolved as a result of a beneficial mutation in the ancestors of today’s chickens and became inherited in chickens. Eggs with OV-17, the predominant protein in the ancestors of chickens, later produced the chickens we know today. This shows us that the first chicken was produced from a chicken egg produced by one of the chicken’s close ancestors.
“Does the chicken come out of the egg or does the egg come out of the chicken?” We tried to clarify the question scientifically. When we look at the result, we can clearly see that every chicken comes from one egg. Although the research on whether this egg is a chicken egg is still going on, the answer to our question will be “the chicken hatched from an egg”.
Source: 1, 2, 3, 4
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