If you are told that it is the chicken, you will logically ask: “But this chicken does come out of an egg, right? “. So, what is the point of trying to answer this age-old question in our turn? Well, it could be that after centuries of experience, humanity has finally come to terms with the issue.
The egg before the chicken
First there is the semantic answer: in the question, it is good the egg that comes firstr. But that doesn't really advance the debate. Then comes the scientific answer: the first is the egg… laid by a dinosaur. In fact, the most ancient egg fossils and dinosaur embryos are approximately 190 million years old. Fossils of Archaeopteryx (a feathered dinosaur generally accepted as the earliest of birds) are approximately 150 million years old. Birds generally come after eggs.
This is the logic adopted by the last philosopher to speak of it. This is Roy Sorensen, professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, who has written on the issue.
According to him, it is indeed the egg that comes before the chicken. There mutation would have taken place well over 7000 years ago, before the time when the first birds close to the Gallus gallus domesticus that we know as chickens were domesticated. In essence, a protohen has therefore laid an eggand a protocock impregnated him. But when the genes of the quasi-hen and the rooster merged, they combined in a new way, creating a mutation that accidentally made the baby different from its parents.
Although it took millennia for the difference to be significant, this egg was different enough to become the official progenitor of a new species, now known as… the chicken! In summary, two birds that weren't really chickens created a chicken eggand so we have an answer: the egg came first, then it hatched a chicken.
The chicken before the egg?
Some are still not convinced by this theory, and maintain that the chicken arrived on earth before the egg. In 2010, a group of scientists wrote about this paradox.
“It was long suspected that the egg appeared first, but now we have scientific proof which shows that it was in fact the chicken that arrived first,” explains Dr Colin Freeman, from the University of Sheffield.
Their research focused on the “biomineralization of eggshell, and particularly on a key protein in the shell production “. This protein called “ovocleidin”, necessary for the formation of the chicken egg shell, is not found that in the ovaries of chickens. It is therefore possible to conclude that there is no no egg without a chickenbut even some of the scientists responsible for the study weren't entirely convinced, with one calling the question amusing but pointless. How can we know if the ancestor of the chicken did not already produce this protein?
Also read: The harness for walking a chicken
The chicken or the egg: a debate as old as time
This question has existed since Antiquity, the first trace of it dates back to Aristotle. In a book by Fénelon on the ancient philosophers, we can read a translation of this reflection by the Greek philosopher: “There could not have been a first egg to give birth to a bird, or there would have been a first bird to make an egg, since birds come from eggs.”
As futile as this question may seem, in every era, philosophers have attempted an answer. From Plutarch to Thomas Aquinas, via Denis Diderot, everyone mentions it. The first to try to remove doubt was Charles Darwin, but it seems that he did not succeed, since even today, one study replaces another, with a new answer.
