The Question of the Century
Trust me — it’s not what you’d expect.
When we talk about questions that have plagued mankind for years, the first one — okay, maybe not the first one — but one of the questions we think about is the quandary between which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Although it may come across as a trivial question — one that is frequently asked by children in the form of jest — this question holds the answer to existential dilemmas that philosophers and scientists have failed to answer for centuries (and can we really blame them?).
The classic chicken-or-egg dilemma is absolutely mind-bending: chickens need to lay eggs, yet for a chicken to exist, it must hatch from an egg. If we assert the chicken came first, we’re confronted with the necessity of an egg from which it emerged. On the flip side, if we argue that the egg came first, we’re reminded that a chicken must have had to lay that egg. This question was so perplexing that the great Aristotle himself pondered upon it; he reckoned that both the chicken and the egg must have always existed simultaneously, so as to allude to the eternal nature of life.
However, it just isn’t as simple as that. Consequently, Charles Darwin took it upon himself to look for rational explanations. On the contrary to Aristotle, Darwin’s proposed theory (and a much more pragmatic one for that matter) suggested that species biologically and genetically evolve over time, as did the chicken. This theory stems from the doctrine of biological mutation, and as it turns out, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection turned out to be more likely than he would have assumed.
Darwin’s Theory
Eggs already existed, much before chickens were introduced to society– after all, they are just an amalgamation of female sex cells. In fact, birds didn’t even show up in fossil records until 150 million years ago; however, eggs, albeit that of land vertebrae, are thought to have been around for more than 325 million years. In simple words, this means that the question whether the egg came first or the chicken is a matter of evolution rather than simple chronology (because, chronologically, the egg has already emerged as a winner between the two).
With advancing technology, scientists have come to the conclusion that chickens have evolved from reptiles — more specifically from theropod dinosaurs — which laid eggs long before the first chicken appeared. Of course, the process of this DNA mutation would have taken centuries to produce the result of what we now recognise as the modern chicken. However, rest assured, it was these embryonic changes that brought life to a whole new array of species, as is the case with a plethora of animals and birds apart from just chicken.
But even if we can conclusively and scientifically say that the egg came before the chicken, the broader question remains: how did the first species, be it human or animal, manifest itself into existence? Because, after all, the question isn’t about the egg and the chicken but about how life began in the first place — but I guess that would be a question for another post (or century for that matter).
