Sunday Special--One of World's Unanswerable Question

    One of World's Unanswerable Question

The chicken or the egg causality dilemma is commonly stated as "which came first: the chicken or the egg?". The dilemma stems from the observation that all chickens hatch from eggs and all chicken eggs are laid by chickens. "Chicken-and-egg" is a metaphoric adjective describing situations where it is not clear which of two events should be considered the cause and which should be considered the effect, to express a scenario of infinite regress, or to express the difficulty of sequencing actions where each seems to depend on others being done first. Plutarchposed the question as a philosophical matter in his essay "The Symposiacs", written in the 1st century CE.

Aristotle, writing in the fourth century BCE, concluded that this was an infinite sequence, with no true origin Plutarch, writing four centuries later, specifically highlighted this question as bearing on a "great and weighty problem." In the fifth century CE, Macrobius wrote that while the question seemed trivial, it "should be regarded as one of importance." By the end of the 16th century, the well-known question seemed to have been regarded as settled in the Christian world, based on the origin story of the Bible. In describing the creation of animals, it allows for a first chicken that did not come from an egg. However, later enlightenment philosophers began to question this solution

So says the Bible: Genesis 1:20–22According to the Creator of chickens, and the author of the Record of their origins, chickens came first. It was on the Fifth Day of Creation Week that He created "every winged fowl after [their] kind" complete with the DNA to reproduce that kind. Then He "blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply" using that DNA. For the chickens this meant lay chicken eggs. Hinduism and Buddhism hold that there is a wheel of time,mening that there is no first in eternity. Time is cyclical. There is no creation, so neither the egg nor the chicken came first

                                                                

In science and engineering, the situation is known as circular reference, in which a parameter must be known to calculate the parameter itself. In other words, one must know something to calculate that same something.Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicist who is often called the successor to Albert Einstein, has argued that the egg came before the chicken. Hawking, an ardent thinker in his own right, is an adherent of Christopher Langan. Both Hawking and Langan are said to have IQs approaching 200. Langan has developed a “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.” He tackles the chicken-and-egg problem in “Which Came First?,” one of the philosophical essays in his book, The Art of Knowing.British scientists, using a supercomputer, claimed to have come up with the final and definitive answer. They identified the protein, ovocleidin-17, that is required to speed up the production of eggshell within the chicken. In twenty-four hours, an egg is ready to be laid. An egg cannot be produced without the chicken. So that settles it, once and for all. The chicken came first.

The first eggs

Eggs are found throughout the animal kingdom. Technically speaking, an egg is simply the membrane-bound vessel inside which an embryo can grow and develop until it can survive on its own.

But let’s focus on the type of bird's egg we recognise today. These first came on the scene with the evolution of the first amniotes many millions of years ago. Prior to their arrival, most animals relied on water for reproduction, laying their eggs in ponds and other moist environments so that the eggs didn’t dry out.

At some point, a different kind of egg began to evolve, which had three extra membranes inside: the chorion, amnion and allantois. Each membrane has a slightly different function but the addition of all these extra layers provided a conveniently enclosed, all-in-one life support system: an embryo can take in stored nutrients, store excess waste products and respire (breathe) without the need of an external aquatic environment. The extra fluids encased in the amnion, plus the tough outer shell, provide extra protection too.

Diagram of a chicken egg in its 9th day—an example of an amniotic egg. 

Amniotic eggs were a big deal. They opened up a whole new world of opportunities for land-based egg-laying locations, and the extra membranes paved the way for bigger (and mostly better) eggs.

We’re still not sure of exactly when this happened, largely because eggy membranes don’t make very good fossils, leaving scientists with no clear record of when, or how, amniotic eggs developed. Our best guess is that the last common ancestor of both tetrapods (four-limbed animals with a backbone) and the amniotes (four-limbed animals with a backbone that lay eggs with all those extra layers) lived around 370-340 million years ago, though some sources put the first amniote species as living closer to 312 million years ago. Today’s mammals, reptiles and birds are all descendants of the first amniotes.

(This leaves us with another eggsellent question: which came first, the amniote or the amniotic egg? But let’s just stick with chickens for now.)

The first chickens

The very first chicken in existence would have been the result of a genetic mutation (or mutations) taking place in a zygote produced by two almost-chickens (or proto-chickens). This means two proto-chickens mated, combining their DNA together to form the very first cell of the very first chicken. Somewhere along the line, genetic mutations occurred in that very first cell, and those mutations copied themselves into every other body cell as the chicken embryo grew. The result? The first true chicken.

A male red junglefowl, the closest ancestor to the modern domestic chicken 

So who were the likely parents of this first One True Chicken? The red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) is native to a range of south-eastern Asian countries including India, southern China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. It’s thought that the red junglefowl was domesticated by humans in Asia and went on to be spread around the world as the less-aggressive and prolific egg-layers that we know and love today (Gallus gallus domesticus).

Archaeological evidence suggests that the red junglefowl was first domesticated some 10,000 years ago, although DNA analysis and mathematical simulations suggest that the domestic chicken actually diverged from junglefowl much earlier (an estimated 58,000 years ago). There’s also evidence to suggest that the domestic chicken’s origins may be slightly more complicated: the genes for the yellow colour seen on the legs of many chooks could have come from the grey junglefowl (Gallus sonneratii), not the red, pointing to some hybridisation between species somewhere along the way.

Back to our original question: with amniotic eggs showing up roughly 340 million or so years ago, and the first chickens evolving at around 58 thousand years ago at the earliest, it’s a safe bet to say the egg came first.

Eggs were around way before chickens even existed.

None or Both

Many millions of years ago, there was a dinosaur. It looked vaguely chicken-like, but it had teeth and claws on its "wings." If you saw one at night, you might briefly mistake it for a chicken.

Over time, though, this creature changed. Its teeth disappeared, as did the claws on its wings. It gained the ability to fly, and then lost it again.

At what point did it become a chicken? It still isn't a chicken, remember? There is no such thing as a chicken

Tyrannosaurus rex chicken

So in a nutshell (or an eggshell, if you like), two birds that weren't really chickens created a chicken egg, and hence, we have an answer: The egg came first, and then it hatched a chicken

Searched,Compiled and Illustrated by Tejinder Kamboj