What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?
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?
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Eggs predate chickens. Chicken eggs evolved simultaneously with chickens. There was no first chicken, nor first chicken egg.
That's not how evolution works. The chicken egg did come before the chicken, because that's where mutations occur.
But chicken are the same species as their wild counterpart, the red jungle fowl. And there's such a diversity of them, some may be more closely related to a wild jungle fowl than to another variety of domestic chicken. Therefore, it seems to me that what defines a chicken (as opposed to a jungle fowl) isn't a specific genetic mutation, but the fact that it's domesticated. And it seems to me that capturing a live jungle fowl would've been easier than hatching an egg you've harvested. The fowl that first laid an egg in captivity may thus already be considered a chicken, although it was born a red jungle fowl, hatched from a red jungle fowl's egg; and only then it laid the first chicken's egg.
No, that is 100% not how evolution works. No individual has ever laid an egg of a different species. One mutation doesn’t make a non-chicken a chicken. Chickens evolved from their ancestors slowly over many many generations. It’s like how you can’t change one word and make a language a different language, but if you change enough words, it becomes a different language.
Let me put it another way. If you take a modern chicken back in time 50,000 years, it could probably breed with a chicken from then. But if you take it back maybe 100,000 years, maybe it can’t breed with a chicken from then. But if you take the chicken from 50kya, it could breed with the chicken from 100kya. So are they all the same species? Are they different species? Are they all chickens?
Humans like to put things in little boxes with clear delineations, but that’s not how nature works. Species don’t come to be from one mutation. They evolve as the accumulation of many many mutations over many many generations. There’s no point at which you can say that child is a different species than their parent.
I'm not saying some completely different bird laid an egg that contained a chicken. The change may be gradual, but the mutations still happen in the eggs. The first chicken or chickens were hatched, not transformed by radioactive goo.
And what I’m telling you is that there was no first chicken, just like there was no first Spanish speaker. Species don’t evolve that way.
Doesn't the saying go 'there's a first for everything'?
Just because it’s a saying doesn’t mean it’s true for everything. Every child is the same species as its parent.
Sure, and since that means that there can be no new species unless they magically appear, there is only one species on this planet. Just very.. varying
Ok, let me put it another way. Green and red are clearly different colors, right? But if you make a gradient where the green smoothly transitions to the red, there isn’t one single point where it changes from “green” to “red”. This doesn’t mean that the two colors on the ends aren’t completely different colors, it means that when you look at every pixel, they’re almost exactly the same color as the pixel next to them.
Different species exist. Speciation is a thing. I’m not claiming otherwise. But creatures don’t birth a species other than their own. It takes many many many generations over eons of time for a population to speciate. Speciation is something that happens to populations, not individuals.
Funny you mention colours, you can very easily determine the point where it's more green than red.
Maybe if you examine the hex codes, but what if it’s paint? And what do you call that color in the middle? Is it green? Or red? Or neither? Something in between? What if the lighting conditions mess with it?
Species aren’t measured digitally, so the metaphor isn’t perfect, but I hope you can see what I mean by it. My bigger point is that speciation happens on a population level, not an individual level. Parents don’t have children of a different species. Populations evolve into different species.