Scientists are still trying to answer the age-old chicken-and-egg question (2024)

FAQs

What is the answer to the chicken and egg question? ›

What did you find? BENTON: Yeah, well, the quick answer is the egg, because the chicken is just one of many birds. And of course, all birds, as we well know, lay an egg with a hard shell. So if you're familiar with your breakfast egg, that's pretty much the same for all birds.

This just in: The scientists have solved it. After a millennium of taunting young biologists and philosophers as Plutarch pondered: “Which was first, the bird or the egg?” the great chicken and egg debate is perhaps coming to a close. The chicken (or, rather its amniote ancestor) has beat the egg.

Dinosaurs laid eggs, the fish that first crawled out of the sea laid eggs, and the weird articulated monsters that swam in the warm shallow seas of the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago also laid eggs. They weren't chicken's eggs, but they were still eggs. So the egg definitely came first.

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.

Even the specialised sort of eggs laid by birds, with their tough outer membrane, evolved more than 300 million years ago. As for chickens, they came into being much later. They are domesticated animals, so evolved as the result of humans purposefully selecting the least aggressive wild birds and letting them breed.

Even though we don't have a complete fossil record, scientists are convinced that all birds are descended from dinosaurs. So just as humans are mammals, chickens are dinosaurs.

Yes. It is a rare occurrence. When two chicks hatch from the same egg, the egg usually has two yolks. Usually, one embryo out competes the other and only one chick survives to hatch.

It's unlikely, but not impossible. Most commercial egg farms have strictly all-female flocks because male chickens aren't needed for egg production and aren't suitable for meat either (chickens raised for meat are a different breed).

a situation in which it is impossible to say which of two things existed first and which caused the other one. Confusion, confusing and feeling confused.

A human "egg" is an ovum, a single cell. A chicken egg, on the other hand, is complex structure constructed by the mother bird's reproductive tract in various stages. Most of the volume of a chicken egg is not the egg cell itself.

Are we eating chicken when we eat eggs? ›

Most eggs that people eat come from chicken, and chicken are poultry. That said, eggs are an animal byproduct—they're unfertilized eggs from the chicken. Think of them kind of like milk from cows. “So eggs themselves are not actually poultry,” Cording says.

Charles Darwin proposed that chickens descended from the red jungle fowl—a colorful tropical bird in the pheasant family–because the two look so much alike. But proving him right has been difficult. Five varieties of jungle fowl range from India to northern China, and small chicken bones are rare in fossil sites.

The modern biological approach revealed that a red junglefowl subspecies is the main wild ancestor of the domestic chicken. However, other red junglefowl subspecies and wild junglefowl species also contributed to the modern domestic chicken genetic profile.

It's pretty safe to say that the egg came first, because if there had been no egg, there would have been no chicken. Chickens are birds, and we know that birds evolved from reptiles, so we can say that the first bird hatched from an egg that was laid by a reptile that was very similar to, but not quite, a bird itself.

Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University's Department of Engineering Materials: “It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first.

Supply chain disruptions have further exacerbated the egg crisis. Complex supply chain structures and shortages of essential supplies and transportation have made it challenging for national egg producers to meet the growing demand, leading to price hikes and supply shortages.

There's an egg shortage because the ongoing bird flu outbreak reduced the number of egg-laying chickens. As of March 6, the virus has affected more than 82 million birds in the U.S. since January 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of the birds affected were egg-laying hens.

How did PayPal overcome the thorny chicken-or-egg problem? Paypal made the sign up process easier which attracted a good number of buyers. They then began giving out "free" money and used referrals to get people to sign up and use the app. Finally, they focused efforts on eBay, and encouraged users to pay with Paypal.

Researchers found that the formation of egg shells relies on a protein found only in a chicken's ovaries. Therefore, an egg can exist only if it has been inside a chicken. The protein – called ovocledidin-17, or OC-17 – acts as a catalyst to speed up the development of the shell.