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Which came first, the chicken or the egg - what does science actually say?

It sounds like an unanswerable riddle, but biologists and geneticists actually have a pretty confident answer to this one - it just depends on how precisely you define "chicken" and "egg." Some angles point to the egg winning easily (reptiles were laying eggs long before birds existed), while others argue it's really about the exact moment a genetic mutation created the first true chicken inside an egg laid by a bird that wasn't quite a chicken yet. Which explanation actually settles it for you?

🗳️ 15 votes so far🏆 Leading: Geneticists say the egg came first, and pretty precisely too: a bird that was almost-but-not-quite a chicken laid an egg containing a genetic mutation that made the embryo inside the first true chicken. That egg was laid by a non-chicken, so the mutated DNA - and the chicken it produced - only existed once the egg was already there. (33%)🥈 It's actually a false dichotomy - evolution is gradual, not a single switch flipping from "not-chicken" to "chicken" in one generation. There was never one clean moment; species boundaries are fuzzy human categories drawn over a continuous chain of near-identical parents and offspring, so demanding one exact answer misunderstands how evolution works. (33%)🥉 The egg came first, easily - amphibians and reptiles were laying eggs hundreds of millions of years before chickens, or even birds, existed. If "egg" just means an egg (not specifically a chicken egg), this isn't really a close contest - eggs predate chickens by an enormous margin. (27%)⚖️ Split decision🌍 🇨🇳 China
Geneticists say the egg came first, and pretty precisely too: a bird that was almost-but-not-quite a chicken laid an egg containing a genetic mutation that made the embryo inside the first true chicken. That egg was laid by a non-chicken, so the mutated DNA - and the chicken it produced - only existed once the egg was already there.
It's actually a false dichotomy - evolution is gradual, not a single switch flipping from "not-chicken" to "chicken" in one generation. There was never one clean moment; species boundaries are fuzzy human categories drawn over a continuous chain of near-identical parents and offspring, so demanding one exact answer misunderstands how evolution works.
The egg came first, easily - amphibians and reptiles were laying eggs hundreds of millions of years before chickens, or even birds, existed. If "egg" just means an egg (not specifically a chicken egg), this isn't really a close contest - eggs predate chickens by an enormous margin.

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Why do scientists say chicken came first? And, of course, eggs happened long before birds or chickens came along. And, of course, eggs happened long before birds or chickens came along. So if indeed a single mutation can be identified as having produced the first chicken that ...
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Lee Hsien Loong's performance as Singapore PM

Done well?

🏆 Leading: Instrumental to Singapore's growth (67%)🥈 Some good, some bad (33%)🌍 🇨🇳 China, 🇭🇰 Hong Kong

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It's mostly sentimental, reflecting his performance as the Prime Minister of Singapore, From losing GRC to more GRCs, the Malay presidency and
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Our Prime minister Lee Hsien Loong is the highest paid leader in the world, 12.5x that of Putin. r/singapore - Our Prime minister Lee Hsien
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