(CNN) Chicken and egg debate unscrambled

[banana republican]

LONDON, England -- It's a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/26/chicken.egg/index.html

[tuvor]

1. Great. Now that we know the answer, what do we do with it?

[banana republican]

2. Scrambled or Over Easy????? n/t

[Placebo]

4. mmm, scrambled!

:9

[neoblues]

3. Didn't Dinosaurs Lay Eggs...

Long before Birds evolved (from Dinosaurs as well)?

[Dead_Parrot]

5. I think the egg's been around for ~500 million years...

...long before the dinosaurs. Or vertebrates, for that matter...

[neoblues]

7. Ahhh... right. Feesh Eggs.

and Amphibian eggs... Though, I meant "hard-shelled" eggs--which, alas, I did not say.

[Ravy]

6. I tested this myself.

5 restaurants. 5 orders for chicken and eggs. They come at the same time, although 3 served a salad first.

[Karmakaze]

8. What the hell? That was obvious!

In fact I knew that decades ago.

[mzteris]

9. you're all wrong!

GOD CREATED the chicken first.


He poofed all the animals into place just exactly like the look now - on - what day was that?

"And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. . . . And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. "


Interesting side note for those into the carnivore/herbivore/vegetarian debate:

29. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.


I'm not seeing where God told "man" that "every beast of the earth . . . fowl of the air, . . . every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life" - was for MEAT for them! hmmmmmm............

[Finding the Trurh]

14. And God Said

And so it must follow that If you are a fundamentalist born again christian who "believes" and take the bible literally you had better be a vegetarian or you are a hypocrite.

[mzteris]

15. It's the rare

"Christian" I've met who's a veggie......

They think God "gave man dominion" and put animals here JUST for us to eat. :(

[DireStrike]

10. Somebody got paid to figure this out?

I coulda told them the answer. =/

[htuttle]

11. Well, if you take 'chicken' literally, that's true. But...

...if what you really mean is 'which came first, egg-laying animals or eggs?', then it would have to be egg-laying animals (ie., 'the chicken'). If the first egg-laying animal came from an egg, then it's mother was actually the first egg-laying animal.

At some point, an animal that wasn't born from an egg was born with the genes to lay an egg, and did so.

But it wasn't a chicken.

[unpossibles]

12. I thought it was a rooster

then he fell asleep.

:O

[Finding the Trurh]

13. The egg

What came first? Easy. The egg. Dinosaur eggs, lots of them, that eventually evolved into birds.

[Akoto]

16. That must've been one confused T-Rex mommy. :)