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| Courtesy: Mother Nature Network |
Oftentimes, this question finds importance during a party or picnic. One person is always ready to ask this question and no one knows the answer. Later, everybody laughs out loud ignoring to think what would have come first.
This is more of a riddle than a question which does not have a straightforward answer. One would definitely presume the existence of the egg should come chronologically first as the chicken is hatched only later from the egg. But if so is correct, then who did produce the egg in the first place? There must be, at least, a hen to produce the egg, and hatch it. The cycle of thoughts goes on, but we don’t reach anywhere to its solution in this way.
Here, we have to ponder over the evolution process. Just like the apes are thought to be the primes of human beings (Homo sapiens), there was once a separate living being which for easiness we call them ‘Pro-chicken’. Just like apes did also give birth to a child, human also did so. In a similar way, in the pro-chicken era, there were no hens at all. The Pro-chicken used to lay eggs and hatch them to produce more pro-chicken. This process continued for a long time.
In one happenstance of a mutation, a pro-chicken laid a slightly different egg. As the mother pro-chicken hatched the egg, there was a separate species coming from the egg which bore a lot of resemblances with the pro-chicken. The species are now popularly known as chicken or hen. And due to these chickens, we face this heck of a question on a weekly or monthly basis: which came first: the egg or chicken?
By now, I believe you have understood the concept. I have avoided the scientific jargon to name the pro-chicken (it is from the Gallus genus of Phasianidae family) to simplify the theory. Basically, if one has to answer quickly, of course, the egg came first. But also, we have to be clear that the first egg which started the first chicken was not from the chicken. That means it turns out the first chicken thus produced from the egg of a pro-chicken laid a chicken egg. It might be confusing but let’s summarize it:
1. The egg came first before chicken (there was a first egg which gave rise to chicken).
2. The chicken came first before the CHICKEN egg (the first chicken gave the first chicken egg).
This is the most widely accepted theory to answer this riddle. However, there exist other explanations too. In the evolution process, one event of mutation took place in any of the two phases:
1. If the mutation occurred in the egg which carried the chicken inside it. Then the egg came first.
2. If the mutation occurred in the freshly hatched chicken (or a pro-chicken), then chicken came first.
My advice: use the first theory to easily conceive and explain it to others.
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