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The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoBoth - a chicken with a lifetime of eggs. God created the first female chickens with eggs.
- visarga 2y agoFirst came the reptiles, then the chicken. Eggs are hundreds of millions of years older than chicken.
- finnh 2y agoAlso I think by definition a chicken is a bird that hatches from an egg (among other defining characteristics). So th egg must have come first, as a chicken-like creature that didn't come from an egg wouldn't be a chicken.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoI'm not sure if this is intended as serious or tongue-in-cheek. Obviously parents come before offspring. The earliest form of reproduction is just binary fission - what an amoeba does by splitting itself into two. In it's simplest (origins of life) form this is just a mechanical process of a proto-metabolism (bunch of chemicals) being split into parts that are smaller versions of the "parent", e.g. some proto-cell composed of seashore froth being whipped into smaller versions of itself. Eventually the division process became asymmetrical with the spawned child being a simpler proto-version of the adult, capable of then independently developing into the adult form. It seems life developed in the oceans before emerging onto land, so the history is probably of multi-cellular fish-precursors reproducing by spawning simpler (conceptually egg-like) versions of themselves, eventually evolving into egg-laying fish, and then egg-laying land-based animals including the dinosaurs from which birds developed. So, maybe the best answer to "which came first, chicken or egg?" is "fish".
- finnh 2y agoI'm glad you couldn't tell! It's basically tongue in cheek, as the question is silly to begin with. And of course eggs predate chicken, eggs are seriously old technology. Back to the tongue in cheek: there is something easily tautological that chickens come from eggs. At some point a non-chicken laid an egg, and the first chicken was born from it. This is true regardless of which mutation one decides is "the" mutation that makes for the "first" chicken. QED it's the egg
- randomdata 2y agoThe question is asking if the first chicken hatched from a chicken egg (the egg came first) or if the first chicken hatched from an egg of the animal that laid the egg (the chicken came first). Of course, it is just a thought experiment that is ultimately unanswerable. There is no such thing as a distinct chicken or distinct chicken egg.
- randomdata 2y agoThe koan implies chicken egg, though, not any old egg. Did the proto-chicken lay a chicken egg which hatched the first chicken, or did the proto-chicken lay a proto-chicken egg which hatched the first chicken?
- StevenWaterman 2y agoIf a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, the chicken came first If a chicken egg is an egg that hatches into a chicken, the egg came first. We know that the first case is correct because an unfertilised egg laid by a chicken is called a chicken egg despite by definition not hatching into a chicken. Therefore the chicken came first
- iwontberude 2y agoThere is this implicit bias in your question that complexity comes from a discontinuous change which can be noticed at one moment, it’s much more diffuse and gradual. Just like we won’t know we are in World War 3 for another couple years.
- randomdata 2y agoOf course. Communicating that bias in a fun and relatable way is the intent of the question.
- jprete 2y agoI guess it depends on whether the crucial mutation that flipped the organism from "non-chicken" to "chicken" happened before or after fertilization! Or alternatively we can say that the germ line went from 49% chicken to 50% chicken to 51% chicken? Biology is really a continuous state space anyway and trying to push things into categories too hard will break them.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoBut where is the cutoff between reptile and chicken? Given how gradual it must've been, we can therefore posit that chicken's ancestors were themselves chicken. What came first, the reptile or the egg?
- maxwell 2y agoThe egg. But it looks like phylotypic animal body plans may have originated in cell aggregates before the development of the egg: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jez.b.21417 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jez.b.21417
- tyre 2y agothe evolutionary chicken of Theseus
- thebruce87m 2y agoChickens are birds and therefore dinosaurs. Therefore instead of Chicken of Theseus, I propose Chicken of Thesaurus.
- quesera 2y ago> I propose Chicken of Thesaurus Which itself is surely evolved from Chicken of Thesea. And, consequently, canned tuna.
- Funes- 2y agoIs this just a mindless comment made without even skimming through the article or thinking about the actual meaning and intention behind the question? It's an intended correction I could attribute to a caricature of an autist, taking everything in absurdly literal terms. Typical of HN, in any case... The article talks about the actual origin of embryonic development mechanisms, pointing out that they could've preceded the existence of the animals that came out of them, not literally chickens and eggs (of course, its title uses those terms figuratively): >"In fact, the study shows that either the principle of embryonic development existed before animals, or multicellular development mechanisms evolved separately in C. perkinsii." It all boils down to the debate surrounding abiogenesis: the constant egg-chicken (or gamete-organism) loop does not explain how life came to be, emerging from, in principle, no life. It's paradoxical, just like trying to answer "the chicken" or "the egg". Or, as you seem to prefer, "the reptile" or "the egg".
- technothrasher 2y agoI don't think the question is whether any egg came before any chicken. That's obviously an egg, as you are implying. But the question is really, I think, what makes an egg a chicken egg? Is it an egg that is laid by a chicken or is it an egg from which a chicken hatches?
- archsurface 2y agoAn egg laid by a chicken is also an egg from which a chicken hatches, unless significant mutation. An egg from which a chicken hatches could be a mutant laid by a non-chicken. But it's a bit sorites heap trying to decide which mutation makes the non-chicken a chicken.
- Bengalilol 2y agoNice read. Anyways ... Hindu Mythology: Universe emerged from a "cosmic egg" (Brahmanda). Greek Mythology: Orphic tradition describes a universe hatching from an egg. Chinese Mythology: Pangu broke out of a cosmic egg, creating heavens and earth. Big Bang Theory: Universe began from a dense, hot "singularity," conceptually like a cosmic egg. Symbolic Parallel: Egg symbolizes unity and potential, akin to the universe's origin. What's a chicken?
- aitchnyu 2y agoAn egg's way of making another egg.
- CoopaTroopa 2y agoA vessel to cross the street.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago>A vessel to cross the street. I literally cannot source this pun, and my ego refuses to believe you can had been this clever. "Ogres are like onions! They have layers, just like onions. You get it? We both have layers" We are all just recursive instances of magnitudes of complexity, and the "automata" we dissuade ourselves into denying we are not is just an ironic emergent property of being able to "think". "Delineation" between these automata is only possible with edges - a membrane, an egg, of sorts.
- CoopaTroopa 2y agoSorry for your ego but that came right from my brain as a joke. It wasn't until after I hit submit I paused to think, "that's actually kinda profound for a Thursday morning."
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoAh, well, neither of our ego's can take credit, then. Id take the credit for it, but lack the ego.
- rk06 2y agoWait, people actually debate this? As per theory of evolution, current species were created from ancestor species. Since chicken's ancestor species obviously laid eggs. It stands to reason that first chicken came from chicken egg which came from non-chicken! So, egg came first. Update: fixed typo
- andrewflnr 2y agoHere it's a joke, I think. Mostly.
- from-nibly 2y agoActually it's more like trading pokemon. You could probably breed each ancient chicken in a chain all the way up to modern chickens but you just can't breed modern chickens with ancient chickens directly.
- jimmaswell 2y agoWhat about when the number of chromosomes changes?
- pelagicAustral 2y agoI think a bigger debate is why did it cross the road...
- andrewflnr 2y agoUsually choanoflagellates are considered the nearest non-animal protist to animals. These guys aren't so far off, and maybe shared an ancestor capable of multicellularity, but they're probably not ancestors of animals. So my non-expert guess is that this pattern of embryo-like division is convergent. If not, the evolutionary tree is about to get shuffled big time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanozoa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanozoa and the containing group, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holozoa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holozoa Edit: folks, there actually is some interesting science here if you can avoid getting hung up on the silly title.
- adrian_b 2y agoMany choanoflagellates are colonial, so they exhibit a primitive form of multicellularity that differs from true multicellularity by the lack of differentiation between cells. It is likely that the ancestor of all choanoflagellates was already colonial. The fact that Chromosphaera is also multicellular for the initial part of its life and it also shows differentiation in at least 2 kinds of cells does not imply that it is more closely related to the animals than the choanoflagellates. Also in some choanoflagellates, differentiation in 2 kinds of cells has been observed and it has been verified that the same genes are involved in multicellularity, both in animals and in choanoflagellates. See e.g. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/452185v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/452185v1 So this new discovery just pushes back the origin of the mulicellularity of the animal type, from the common ancestor of animals and choanoflagellates to the ancestor of all opisthokonts more closely related to humans than to mushrooms. (Opisthokonts are a group of living beings composed of animals, fungi and their relatives, which are characterized by cells that swim using one posterior flagellum, like the human sperm cells.) It is likely that the split between the opisthokonts related to animals and the opisthokonts related to fungi has arisen because the former have remained in marine environments while the latter have adapted to continental environments, so in order to survive desiccation the ancestors of fungi have acquired a cell wall made of chitin that has protected their cells but which has caused the loss of their mobility, leading to the difference in lifestyles, where animals move around finding and eating their food, while the fungal spores are spread passively by wind and then they grow into their food.
- jondiggsit 2y agoWell I'm glad we've put this age old question to bed
- andsoitis 2y agoAs others have pointed out, this is not the right question to ask now that we know about Darwinian evolution through natural selection. This is a reminder, however, that the questions we ask are very powerful framing devices that can constrain or liberate our thinking.
- glimshe 2y agoA cheeken laid the egg with the first chicken in it.
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- BMc2020 2y agoThere were eggs long before there were anything like a bird or a chicken. But if you're on the strict interpretation, the change was so gradual over so many generations it's hard if not impossible to detect. Even when it speciates (becomes unable to produce viable offspring after mating) is hard to tell. There was like likely a long stretch of many generations where sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. TL:DR; How long is a piece of string? edit: Variation of the same question: Were there radio waves before there radios? Jupiter and thunderstorms produce them, but we had no way of knowing so to us they did not exist.
- randomdata 2y ago> Variation of the same question: Were there radio waves before there radios? I'm not sure that is analogous. The chicken/egg question is about at what point we started identifying an egg as being a chicken egg as opposed to being an egg from another animal. In other words, did the first chicken egg come from a chicken (meaning the chicken came first), or from a proto-chicken (meaning the egg came first)? A closer variation might be: Which came first, the radio broadcast or the radio broadcaster? Before the radio broadcast and radio broadcaster there was radio and people using radio, but they did not reach a wide public audience. At some point the early small-scale experimental radio use turned into broad utilization, but when and which was earlier on the timeline?
- BMc2020 2y agoI'd have to go with radio broadcaster. You can make radio waves by touching the poles of a battery together with a wire. BUT, if you don't know you are making radio waves are you still a broadcaster?
- randomdata 2y ago> You can make radio waves by touching the poles of a battery together with a wire. You can. But making radio waves does not imply a broadcast. At least not in the traditional sense. I'll grant you that colloquially we have sometimes come to refer to any radio transmission as a broadcast, but that is not the usage here. > BUT, if you don't know you are making radio waves are you still a broadcaster? If you didn't know a chicken emerged from an egg, is it still a chicken? My experience with young children who don't yet understand that process would say yes. No doubt there are career radio broadcasters out there who are not familiar with the science of radio. It's not about not knowing of the existence of something, though. We know the chicken came from an egg. We just don't know what kind of egg it was. Was it a chicken egg or was it a flibberdoodle egg? If it was a chicken egg, how did the flibberdoodle lay a chicken egg? If it was a flibberdoodle egg, how did a chicken come out?
- rtwld 2y agoHere is a (professional) philosophical perspective on the problem, with an interesting discussion in the comments http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/02/egg-came-first.html http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/02/egg-came-first....
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- m3kw9 2y agoIt’s chicken because if you use evolution, an animal will evolve to have egg so that “chicken” must have been there first to evolve to be able to lay eggs. Took me 5 min to figure the biggest question mankind had to offer.
- theobreuerweil 2y agoIt’s funny, I always thought it was obviously egg. Assuming evolution, the first recognisable “chicken” must have been the product of a mutation, hence the egg from which it hatched was the origin of the first ever chicken.
- ionwake 2y agoIt’s chicken
- 747-8F 2y ago.
- ajdude 2y agoIs this a representation of an egg?