Tuesday, March 23, 2010

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

I hate it when there's debate about "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". Or if a seemingly unanswerable question is posed, it gets described as "a real chicken and egg problem" or something like that.

Evolution was discovered quite a while ago which makes the answer obvious as far as I'm concerned.

Here's the science bit...

First: Birds evolved from lizards. Lizards lay eggs. Therefore, eggs were around for a long time before birds were.

Second: The way evolution works (in a very simplified fashion, it has to do with genetic mutations which change creatures ever so slightly over thousands of years) something that was a bird, but not exactly chicken, once laid an egg. Out of this egg emerged something that was a chicken.

So, the egg came first, no matter what way you look at it. Mystery solved.

2 comments:

Em said...

So... where did the lizards come from?

Anonymous said...

Gah. Evolution!