I think the egg came first because in order for the chicken to even exist and evolve to its current state, it would need to be first hatch only BY THEN it becomes the famous clucking bird we know and love.
Checkmate chicken-ists your move?
I think the egg came first because in order for the chicken to even exist and evolve to its current state, it would need to be first hatch only BY THEN it becomes the famous clucking bird we know and love.
Checkmate chicken-ists your move?
Every individual is different than their parents. We don’t see large scale changes from one species to another from a single generation, but from population changes over huge amounts of time.
Sometimes there’s a mutation that allows previous features to come back in an individual showing the history. Look up images of chickens with teeth.
Chickens as we know them now in a farm didn’t exist until we did our own evolutionary selection to change them to something that would have more meat on them by picking the preferred ones. Dogs are another very obvious demonstration of that. Dogs came from a now extinct ancestor of wolves, so you can carry the same fallacy, when did the wolf become a dog? It wasn’t the first ones that were lured in by a warm place and food, was it the second generation?
Evolution doesn’t have clear lines, humans just like to classify things. It’s a lot easier to do that with species separated by millions of years because the details have changed enough.
You have the correct answer, echoed by others. If one could draw a sharp line, then we would see proto-chickens laying eggs containing chickens and then some of those chickens laying eggs containing proto-chickens, back and forth for many generations. The combination of alleles that qualifies an organism as a chicken would arise and then often be reversed by recombination in the next generation. Eventually as more and more of the population has chicken allele combinations, the percentage of chickens born would grow as the reversals became less numerous than the forward conversions.
Now, what defines whether an egg is a proto-chicken egg or a chicken egg? An egg is formed by the action of maternal genes, so it will have the characteristics given to it by the proto-chicken mother. But if you just define an egg that hatches a chicken as a chicken egg (rather than an egg laid by a chicken), the egg always comes first.