The first egg to appear was or. What came first

Question egg or chicken championship has been standing since ancient Greece.

Great philosophers, in particular Aristotle, believed that there could be no primacy here, the process of the appearance of both the chicken and the egg could only be simultaneous, otherwise the whole essence of the origin of life or its creation by the Almighty would be reduced to absurdity.

The point of view of modern philosophers on this issue looks completely different: the first chicken did not come from the egg of a CHICKEN, which as a species did not yet exist, but from the egg of some other, close to a chicken of a previous species.With this hatched chicken a new species began - domestic chicken. Such evolutionary transformations are possible only in the germ cells from which offspring are born. The process is long and can last several million years. So philosophers say that the first was an egg.

British scientist John Brookfield also proved in 2006, using new discoveries in the field of genetics, that the first egg was.

And just recently, it seems that this dilemma about the primacy of the egg or the chicken has received a new logical conclusion. The cause-and-effect relationship has been established scientifically and experimentally: again, British scientists, through experimental research, swapped the chicken and the egg.

After all, for offspring to appear, there must be a parent. In the Bible this has been said a long time ago, and finally, science managed to experimentally confirm this fact. Thorough computer studies of chicken eggs have proven that the formation of the shell occurs from those substances that the bird receives from food. And only chicken protein is formed inside the chicken itself, i.e. is produced by herself with the help of the Ovocleidin-17 protein, which is located in her ovaries. So only a chicken could lay it down egg, from which a chicken could then emerge. Without a chicken there can be no egg! First the chicken, then the egg!

So the philosophical question of the primacy of the chicken or the egg has now been resolved in favor of the chicken mother. However, I personally believe that although all this is scientific confirmation, it is quite possible that we will soon hear about new discoveries that will refute what is stated here, as has happened more than once. Who knows?

After all, the appearance of the first chicken and other birds, like everything that surrounds us around since the birth of the entire Universe, as well as everything that happened before that moment, is one of those many mysteries of the world that makes a person think, explore and try to understand the essence.

Sometimes it seems to me that the very purpose of understanding a person is to understand HOW it all happened...

What came first: the egg or the chicken?

Editor's response

Scientists and philosophers believe that the egg was the first, but theologians argue with this. Total - 2:1 - in favor of the egg. From the point of view of scientists, the egg appeared long before the appearance of the chicken in the process of evolution, and besides, everyone knows the fact that the origin of life occurs in the egg.

From Aristotle to Darwin

The first to raise the problem of “the egg or the chicken” (or, more precisely, “the egg or the bird”) Aristotle. He believed that the bird and the egg appeared at the same time. More than 2 thousand years ago, Aristotle reasoned as follows: an egg could not be the first to give rise to birds, for it itself must be laid by it, and a bird cannot be the first, since it itself emerged from an egg - which means they appeared at the same time.

Later, this problem was widely discussed by philosophers Ancient Greece, including Plutarch, who formulated the question in the usual version for us - “the egg or the chicken.” Medieval scholastics also actively dealt with this problem, taking the teachings of Aristotle as the basis of their philosophy - and they came to much more complex conclusions than a simple reading of the Bible, from which the primacy of the chicken seems to follow:

“And there was evening and there was morning: the fourth day. And God said: Let the water bring forth living things; and let the birds fly over the earth, across the firmament of heaven. And God created the great fish and every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that [it] was good. And God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters of the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth" (Genesis 1: 19-22).

From a theoretical point of view Darwin, the first was an egg. Since the egg is the largest cell, and the world, according to Darwin, arose from the smallest “self-revitalized” cells.

Philosophical view of the egg

In turn, to get an answer, modern philosophers have tried to find a logical error in the question. The first idea is that the concepts “egg” and “chicken” themselves have an unclear scope, and in nature there may be objects about which it is impossible to clearly say whether they are or are not included in the concepts “egg” or “chicken”. There are different types of eggs, from eggs to eggs, that some people may classify as an “egg” and others may not. In the process of evolution, there were many intermediate forms of birds, about which it is impossible to say unambiguously whether it was a chicken or not. Before the chicken, there was an intermediate form of bird that also laid eggs, and at some point this bird began to be called a chicken, and its eggs - chicken.

Another approach assumes that there is a strict solution to the paradox - a clear line between “chicken” and “non-chicken”. In this case, the solution to the paradox depends on the precise definition of what is a “chicken's egg.” If it is “the egg that the hen laid,” then the chicken came first, and if it is “the egg from which the chicken hatched,” then the egg came first.

A beautiful solution was proposed by a British philosopher Spencer in the 19th century: “The hen is only a means by which one egg produces another egg,” thus eliminating one of the objects of the riddle.

Modern view of biologists

Modern biologists believe that the egg as an object arose earlier than the chicken, since egg-laying appeared much earlier than the chicken and birds in general (for example, in dinosaurs, Archeopteryx). That is, tens of millions of years ago, long before the appearance of birds, eggs already existed.

If we talk specifically about a chicken egg, then our modern knowledge about genetics. It is known that during life the genetic material remains unchanged, i.e. an adult bird - the ancestor of a chicken - could not mutate into a chicken after it hatched from an egg. This means that the mutation that led to the appearance of a new biological species, could only occur at the embryonic stage - inside the egg. Thus, the chicken could have hatched from an egg laid by an ancestor bird not related to the chicken species. Therefore, in an evolutionary sense, the egg came first.

However, nature always turns out to be more amazing than our modern ideas about it. In 2012, the BBC reported funny case in Sri Lanka, where a hen gave birth to a chick without laying an egg. The chick was born healthy and fully formed, but the chicken died from internal injuries received during childbirth. According to veterinarians, the fertilized egg developed into a full-fledged chicken in 21 days.

Hello! I am a huge fan of your site and science as such, but I am surprised why the famous question - who came first, the chicken or the egg - is still not on the list of children's questions? I am sure that few parents will be able to easily give a clear answer. I look forward to your answer with great impatience.

Oddly enough, this famous question can be answered unequivocally - the egg appeared first. Only this egg was not a chicken egg at all. Or maybe not quite chicken.

But first, to make the answer clearer, you need to understand what a chicken is and what a chicken egg is. It would seem, what is there to explain? Everyone already knows this: mom buys eggs at the store, and all the children have seen a chicken in a picture or at the zoo (and some even in the wild, in the village). However, in reality, things are often not at all what they appear to be when you just look at them.

You have to be especially careful with the egg here. You look at it - it looks like chicken... And suddenly - bang! And a crocodile hatches from it (Fig. 2). There can be dangerous confusion here, as in Bulgakov’s story “ Fatal eggs"(For me, this is a novel according to all the main diagnostic criteria, but here literary scholars know better).

And all because all eggs are more or less similar. Not necessarily externally: by appearance You can confuse a chicken egg with a crocodile egg, but no one, of course, will confuse a frog or fish egg with a chicken egg. But essentially they are the same thing - fertilized eggs.

Eggs are basically similar in structure to ordinary cells. They also have a nucleus, cytoplasm and outer membrane. On top of it there is almost always a thin shell of proteins. But a chicken egg is much larger than an ordinary egg and has a more complex structure. The diameter of an ordinary cell is one hundredth or one fiftieth of a millimeter. The diameter of the human egg is about one twentieth of a millimeter. The frog egg - egg - without a shell has a diameter of about one millimeter. A chicken egg is the yolk of an egg. The nucleus is not visible because it is small and transparent. And everything else, the protein and the shell, are complex shells (Fig. 3). With them, the chicken covers her egg to protect the future chicken from drying out, pathogenic bacteria and other adversities.

It seems that some people still think that the yolk is the nucleus of the egg, the white is the cytoplasm, and the shell is the membrane. Once, about fifteen years ago, I witnessed a biology teacher explain this in class. IN in this case the teacher was wrong! (It is even partly clear where the wind is blowing: geologists and geographers abuse the comparison of an egg with the Earth: the yolk is the core, the white is the mantle, and the shell is the earth’s crust.)

Like the nucleus of any cell, the nucleus of the egg contains hereditary information. It is written on special very long molecules (they are called DNA). What hereditary information is can be explained to a first approximation even to someone who knows nothing about molecules. This is information about how to make a chicken or a human from an egg. The information is written in letters on one line. The length of this chicken entry is approximately two and a half billion letters. All organisms have only four different letters. And from them words of only three letters are made. Phrases are made from such words (they are called genes). The phrases are quite long. They can be a hundred words or a thousand. Each phrase, if the cell reads it, turns into a protein - a complex molecule-machine.

It is proteins that contract our muscles, carry oxygen from the lungs, strengthen bones and cartilage, and make all sorts of other substances for us. And the composition of proteins determines the color of our hair and eyes, the shape of our nose and ears, and in many ways even our character traits and intelligence. And in general, all our characteristics, including species differences between chicken, crocodile and humans.

In a chicken or human, the body is made up of hundreds of billions of cells, all of which come from the egg. Moreover, chicken cells are very similar to human ones. Looking at a chicken and a person, it’s not easy to guess this! And in the nucleus of each cell in chickens and humans there is information about the whole organism.

It seems that one hundred billion cells is a lot. But in fact, the egg and its descendants can divide quickly - say, once an hour. Then after ten hours there will be approximately 1000 cells (2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2×2 = 1024). In twenty hours - a million. In thirty - a billion. Another 5–6 hours - and the desired number has been reached! So the cells especially don’t have to rush. After all, in fact, a chicken develops in 21 days.

This is not done with chickens and crocodiles - their eggs are difficult to work with. But we have already learned with frogs, mice and many other mammals.

This means that in the cytoplasm of the egg there are some important substances, which help to read hereditary information in such a way as to obtain a whole organism. In addition, two copies of information in eggs is not entirely normal. One copy in the form of a set of 39 chromosomes, that is, 39 DNA molecules, comes from a chicken. The second copy (also in the form of a set of 39 chromosomes) is given by the rooster. The rooster's sperm fuses with the egg while it still has no shell. Then the chicken covers the egg with additional shells, lays the egg and begins to incubate it. The nucleus of the egg duplicates all 78 chromosomes, and 78 chromosomes end up in each daughter cell.

Almost all animals and plants have eggs. But what about other organisms - single-celled organisms? Single-celled organisms such as amoeba are very different in appearance from humans and chickens. But their way of recording information and dividing cells is almost the same. Information about the structure of an amoeba cell is contained in a single nucleus. During reproduction, first the nucleus divides, and then the cell, and two new amoebas are obtained. But the amoeba does not have eggs or sperm.

But many single-celled organisms also have eggs. These “eggs” do not look very similar to chicken eggs. And they behave differently. After merging with the sperm, they quickly divide several times, and then the resulting cells scatter to their own affairs. This is how, for example, eggs of the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas behave (Fig. 4).

And then, in some of our distant ancestors, cells with flagella, formed during egg division, stopped scattering. They remained glued together. We can say that this was the first “chick” - the future animal. What supposedly happened next can be read by interested parents in this scientific article. Gradually, genes changed in such eggs - some were lost, some were doubled, some new ones appeared (we will look at how this happens another time). From such eggs came creatures that looked more and more like chickens. Fish began to emerge from the eggs (eggs). Then, about 400 million years ago, some fish learned to breathe air and walk along the bottom on short legs. And a little later, some of them began to crawl onto land. Gradually they turned into amphibians similar to newts. They laid eggs (eggs) in the water for a very long time. Finally the reptiles appeared. They “learned” to put shells on their eggs and lay them on land (this also includes crocodiles - by the way, the closest relatives of birds among modern reptiles).

Reptiles have legs that make it difficult for them to run for long periods of time. And being able to run quickly and for a long time can, of course, be very useful. And there were reptiles that “learned” to do this. But to do this they had to stand on hind legs. This is how dinosaurs appeared.

Here the birds were already very close. All dinosaurs laid eggs, and some incubated them. Some of the dinosaurs, apparently, were generally very smart and could take care of and raise their “chickens.” They were almost as smart as chickens (and chickens, contrary to popular belief about them, are very smart and cunning birds). And finally, some of these dinosaurs changed their genes slightly, and the scales on their bodies gradually turned into feathers. But the dinosaurs themselves (or rather, some of them) did not become extinct at all - they turned into birds.

Thus, the first true animal egg probably appeared more than 700 million years ago, perhaps more than a billion. The first dinosaur eggs, already very similar to chicken eggs, appeared about 225 million years ago. And the first chickens - more or less close relatives of modern chickens - appeared only 90 million years ago. That's how much older the egg is! And the fact that the first eggs were not chicken eggs - that’s not what the question asks about...

Sveta
What came first - the chicken or the egg? ?

Question: “What came first - the chicken or the future chicken, that is, the egg?” - has haunted man since ancient times. After all, one could not be born without the other. However, modern paleontologists have strong evidence and know the answer.

Eternal question

The history of the search for an answer goes back to ancient times. Aristotle also tried to get a reliable answer, and he lived more than 2 thousand years ago. As a result of thinking that the eggs could not have come first because they had to be laid by a bird, Greek philosopher came to the conclusion that chickens and their product came into being at the same time.

In the Middle Ages, scholasticism emerged. This movement combined religion and science. According to biblical scripture, God created all earthly creatures and blessed them for reproduction. During the debate, the scholastics came to more complex conclusions, but they still determined the primacy of chickens. Darwin believed that the world arose from cells that were “self-animate,” and the rounded object of debate represented the largest egg cell. That's why it should be in the beginning.

Modern philosophers distinguish 2 approaches to the question:

According to some of them, there are no clear boundaries in the concepts of “chicken” and “egg”. The latter may exist in different types, for example, egg, egg, etc. There were also a great variety of intermediate forms of birds in the process of evolution. Before the hen's hour of existence, someone also laid eggs.
The second approach clearly distinguishes chickens and their eggs in the shell. With this formulation of the problem, the chicken should appear first.

Attention! British scientists have isolated a special protein from the shells of chicken eggs that is not found in other birds.

Paleontologists answer

Paleontologists unequivocally say that the oval future appeared first. The Galliformes order is considered the most ancient and numerous. The first representatives existed at the beginning of the Cenozoic.

Birds evolved quickly, resulting in the modern chicken. However, eggs in a dense shell appeared long before this. The relationship of modern birds with ancient dinosaurs has been scientifically proven. Confirmation is the discovery in Madagascar of the remains of a small creature similar to a dinosaur. At one time it had feather cover and actively flew.

Attention! With the help of eggs, the predecessors of dinosaurs reproduced - the first land reptiles, cotylosaurs, which existed more than 300 million years ago.

Despite the evidence, discussions about what came first do not subside and will probably continue for another dozen years.

Which comes first, the egg or the chicken: video

Oddly enough, this famous question can be answered unequivocally - the egg appeared first.
Only this egg was not a chicken egg at all. Or maybe not quite chicken.
But first, to make the answer clearer, you need to understand what a chicken is and what a chicken egg is. It would seem, what is there to explain? Everyone already knows this: mom buys eggs at the store, and all the children have seen a chicken in a picture or at the zoo (and some even in the wild, in the village). However, in reality, things are often not at all what they appear to be when you just look at them.

True, if you take one chicken cell with a nucleus and plant it in a nutrient medium, you will not get a whole chicken this way (although this trick works with plants). Typically, animal cells remember “who they worked for” in the whole organism (see How do cells understand that some should become hair, others bones, others brains, etc.? And from what center are commands given to them?) and retain their properties during reproduction outside the body. To get a whole animal from an ordinary cell, you need to remove the nucleus from it and place it inside the egg (and remove or destroy the nucleus of the egg). Then you can get a whole organism.
This is not done with chickens and crocodiles - their eggs are difficult to work with. But we have already learned with frogs, mice and many other mammals.
This means that in the cytoplasm of the egg there are some important substances that help read the hereditary information in such a way as to obtain a whole organism. In addition, two copies of information in eggs is not entirely normal. One copy in the form of a set of 39 chromosomes, that is, 39 DNA molecules, comes from a chicken. The second copy (also in the form of a set of 39 chromosomes) is given by the rooster. The rooster's sperm fuses with the egg while it still has no shell. Then the chicken covers the egg with additional shells, lays the egg and begins to incubate it. The nucleus of the egg duplicates all 78 chromosomes, and 78 chromosomes end up in each daughter cell.
Almost all animals and plants have eggs. But what about other organisms - single-celled organisms? Single-celled organisms such as amoeba are very different in appearance from humans and chickens. But their way of recording information and dividing cells is almost the same. Information about the structure of an amoeba cell is contained in a single nucleus. During reproduction, first the nucleus divides, and then the cell, and two new amoebas are obtained. But the amoeba does not have eggs or sperm.
But many single-celled organisms also have eggs. These “eggs” do not look very similar to chicken eggs. And they behave differently. After merging with the sperm, they quickly divide several times, and then the resulting cells scatter to their own affairs. This is how, for example, the eggs of the unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas behave.

Several cells with flagella emerge from the Chlamydomonas egg (8)

Once upon a time, only single-celled organisms lived on Earth. This means that multicellular animals evolved from some of them. Scientists do not know exactly where and when the single-celled organisms that became our ancestors lived. They probably lived in shallow seas, and the estimated time frame is from about a billion to 700 million years ago. But what is surprising is that some of the genes in their eggs were already almost exactly the same as those of the chicken. This is known for sure, because such genes are generally almost the same in all organisms from cells with a nucleus. (Think for yourself what such genes might be responsible for.) Thus, “proto-proto-chicken” eggs existed a billion years before chickens.
And then, in some of our distant ancestors, cells with flagella, formed during egg division, stopped scattering. They remained glued together. We can say that this was the first “chick” - the future animal. Gradually, genes changed in such eggs - some were lost, some were doubled, some new ones appeared (we will look at how this happens another time). From such eggs came creatures that looked more and more like chickens. Fish began to emerge from the eggs (eggs). Then, about 400 million years ago, some fish learned to breathe air and walk along the bottom on short legs. And a little later, some of them began to crawl onto land. Gradually they turned into amphibians similar to newts. They laid eggs (eggs) in the water for a very long time. Finally the reptiles appeared. They “learned” to put shells on their eggs and lay them on land (this also includes crocodiles - by the way, the closest relatives of birds among modern reptiles).
Reptiles have legs that make it difficult for them to run for long periods of time. And being able to run quickly and for a long time can, of course, be very useful. And there were reptiles that “learned” to do this. But to do this they had to stand on their hind legs. This is how dinosaurs appeared.
Here the birds were already very close. All dinosaurs laid eggs, and some incubated them. Some of the dinosaurs, apparently, were generally very smart and could take care of and raise their “chickens.” They were almost as smart as chickens (and chickens, contrary to popular belief about them, are very smart and cunning birds). And finally, some of these dinosaurs changed their genes slightly, and the scales on their bodies gradually turned into feathers. But the dinosaurs themselves (or rather, some of them) did not become extinct at all - they turned into birds.
Thus, the first true animal egg probably appeared more than 700 million years ago, perhaps more than a billion. The first dinosaur eggs, already very similar to chicken eggs, appeared about 225 million years ago. And the first chickens - more or less close relatives of modern chickens - appeared only 90 million years ago. That's how much older the egg is! And the fact that the first eggs were not chicken eggs is not something that is asked about in the question...