A scientific study answers the fundamental chicken-and-egg question. Here’s how the researchers went about answering it. Spoiler: it’s not by studying one or the other.
You all know this famous paradox: Who came to Earth first, the egg or the chicken? The chicken lays eggs, but it itself comes from an egg. What follows is an endless loop with no real answer. Some will tell you that we have known the latter for a very long time, as long as we take the terms of the question literally. There were eggs long before the chicken appeared : those of the dinosaurs, of the first fish that crawled out of the water for the first time…
A reasoning that some will find convoluted, but which makes sense. The goal is at the bottom of to know whether the organism capable of laying eggs, whatever it may be, was formed other than by emerging from an egg, or vice versa. A team from the University of Geneva found the answer by studying a single-celled organism called Chromosphaera perkinsii. It has lived at the bottom of the sea, around Hawaii, since over a billion years.
The egg or the chicken? These researchers found the answer
Chromosphaera perkinsii predates any land animal. However, scientists have observed thatit is capable of forming multicellular structures very closely resembling embryos. More precisely, the organism divides without completing the process, that is to say the formation and then the growth of the embryo. The cell can even reach the blastula stage, one of the first stages. But what does this have to do with our original question?
Well, if we reformulate the discovery above, this means that the unicellular organism is capable of the same process as that of animals, the result of which is the egg. As he preceded them, we can conclude that the ability to develop an embryo also arrived before them. From a genetic point of view, the ability to create an egg precedes “the chicken”. QED. Beyond the famous debate, the study will generally provide a better understanding of the evolution of species.
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