Questions are all around us. They are
inescapable. We know that there are good questions and bad questions. There are
questions that pique our interest and ones that we do not really pay much heed
to. There are questions that seem so complex that they hurt our head to
contemplate and seem impossible to answer. The opposite of this are questions
so simple that we wonder why people have bothered to ask them in the first
place. In amongst this variety of questions are those that continue to occur
repeatedly. One of these questions is the question ‘what came first, the
chicken or the egg?’
When asked, the questioner often will sit
back and smile as the questioned wraps their mind around the concept. How could
you know what is in the egg, who laid the egg, what makes a chicken? Surely
this is a question that will prove a conundrum and a talking point for a long
time. It is probably this ambiguity about the solution which is why the
question has entered into common lexicon and is used when considering such
lofty topics as the origin of the universe [1]. Could the genetic
classification of species provide a suitable answer? [2]
There are answers from both sides of the
chicken or egg fence. These range in merit from philosophical takes on the
problem [3] to sophisticated scientific endeavour in looking at the proteins
produced in egg development and their evolutionary origin [4]. The
philosophical argument given supports the egg viewpoint and the protein history
claims to show that the chicken had to have come first.
However I take a different approach the
question and propose that all attempts at answering are irrelevant and
incorrect because they are answering the wrong question. This is not some
attempt to divert the topic down a false avenue or some metaphysical plane of
existential thought. In fact let us look at the question more closely.
The question asks ‘what came first a
chicken or the egg’. The egg, an egg, whose egg are we talking about? We need
to know nothing about the evolution of chickens, or the ideas of classification
of species, or even philosophical argument we only need to know 2 pieces of
information in order to solve this question. Firstly when did chickens appear
on the Earth and secondly were their animals on the planet before chickens that
laid eggs?
Remember the question only states what came
first the chicken or the egg; it is not specific about which type of egg. It
could be an avian egg but there may have been other birds present before
chickens came into being!
In fact a quick search for dinosaurs laying
eggs on the internet yields articles on the egg laying of dinosaurs from the
Cretaceous period [5] [6] (over 66 million years ago). Now if we look to see when chickens appear we
find they are domesticated versions of Red Jungle Fowl, an event which occurred
around 5 thousand years ago [7].
Even if that estimate is out by a hundred
thousand years or a million years or ten million years eggs still came first by
a long way. We know that life began in
the sea and that fish lay eggs so there were species much older than dinosaurs
that will have laid a form of an egg. So to answer the question which came
first the chicken of the egg it was the egg. Simple really, yet that is not the
question that people mean to ask. People mean to ask what comes first the
chicken or the chicken egg.
Now that is a much better question and that
is the point. If we want to get useful answers to the important questions we
need to make sure that the question itself is first scrutinised. Our first act
must always be to question the question.
For only when we understand exactly what
the question is asking are we able to produce an answer worth merit.
Chris Gibson
09/05/13
References
[1] Theosophy "Ancient Landmarks: Plato and Aristotle". Theosophy (September 1939). 27(11): 483–491.
[2] James
Mallet, A species definition for the modern synthesis, Trends in Ecology &
Evolution, 10, Issue 7, July 1995,
Pages 294-299, ISSN 0169-5347, 10.1016/0169-5347(95)90031-4.
[3] The egg came before the chicken.
Roy A. Sorensen. Mind, July 1992 101, 403
[4] Simulations
of Ovocleidin-17 Binding to Calcite Surfaces and Its Implications for Eggshell
Formation Colin L. Freeman, John H. Harding, David Quigley, and P. Mark Rodger The
Journal of Physical Chemistry C 2011 115 (16), 8175-8183
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[5] A nesting trace with eggs for the Cretaceous theropod dinosaur Troodon
formosus Varricchio, DJ (Varricchio, DJ); Jackson, F (Jackson, F); Trueman, CN
(Trueman, CN). JOURNAL OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY : MAR 15
1999 19, 91-100
[6] A Pair of Shelled Eggs Inside A
Female. Tamaki Sato, Yen-nien Cheng, Xiao-chun Wu, Darla K. Zelenitsky, and
Yu-fu Hsiao. Dinosaur Science 15 April 2005: 308 (5720), 375. [DOI:10.1126/science.1110578]
[7] A genetic variation map for chicken
with 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms. International Chicken Polymorphism
Map Consortium (GK Wong et. al.) 2004.Nature 432, 717-722| doi:10.1038/nature03156 PMID 15592405
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