Which Came First: The Chicken or the egg?  How Evolution Answers this Question

The Question "Which Came First"The Chicken Or The Egg?" has been around for many many years. Everyone has a different view on it, either because of religion or personal opinion. However the answer can only be one, and this one answer is found through evolution. So, without further to say, come and  follow me through a journey of explaining the answer to this Long Asked question.

What Is Evolution And How Does It Occur?

First of all, before answering a question like this one we'll need to analyze the needed factors. So, what is evolution, How and When Does it Occur, and, of course, How Does it Answer Our Question?

Evolution is when an organism changes over any amount of time to adapt into different environments. This happens because of breeding, where the Chromosomes of the two parents mix, giving their offspring some mixed traits, along with small adaptations. You can imagine this like it is updating computer code based on other computer code so it can work on a newer program. However, this "code" can be corrupted in some ways, resulting in mutations. Sometimes, these mutations can result in instant death or a lifeless body that never got to be alive. Other times, they can result in an organism that will indeed survive either for little time or for its full life span but not reproduce. But sometimes things go weirdly, and not only does this organism survive but it also reproduces. In that case, the organism's descedants will either evolve this mutation (which for example can be an extra organ) out of them or keep it as an advantage. We should also note that evolution is not a linear process, but something that happens completely randomly and is kind of limitless. For example, some descendants of possibly the first land vertebrate (called Tiktaalik roseae), which is a fish that moved from water to land, went back into water, proving that as I mentioned above, evolution is a completely random and process and not something linear. 

The Amniotic Egg

To answer our question, well first have to define what a "chicken egg" is. If you look at all the eggs in the animal kingdom, you'll see that most of them don't resemble the way a chicken egg. That is because chickens belong in a huge group of vertebrates called Amniotes "Amniota", which are the only animals that have the "amniotic egg". The amniotic egg (along with the first "basal" amniotes) made its appearance somewhere in the Late Carboniferous era (specifically somewhere around 310 million years ago) and it was revolutionary. Unlike the then usual eggs which were soft and light, which also were built in a way that the hatchlings would be born in a state in which they're really vurnerable the amniotic egg didn't only have a strong shell that few organisms at that time could break but it also had a yolk which fed the young animal until it was grown enough to go out of its own.

Hylonomus, a basal amniote 

 Later amniotes would evolve in a way in which the embryo grows inside an area in the Female parent's belly and instead of a yolk it will be fed by the same food that its parent consumes until it finally is born. This is a main trait of the mammals even though some other organisms which at times are completely unrelated organisms (such as ichthyosaurs) also give (and gave) birth to live young.

Answering The Question

So now we know both what evolution and what a chicken egg is. So now the question remains, did the chicken or the egg come first? Before we finally answer this, I would like you to know that I'm assuming that the question is talking about a chicken egg, and that because if it was talking about eggs in general this post would be less than 8 lines. So, what came first? Well, the answer is...

THE CHICKEN EGG

Why though? So, as I said earlier, the offspring is a mix of its parents' genes which results in better adaptations. So now we can imagine two parents which belong to a species which is the direct ancestor of the chicken species. These two parents mate and the female lays eggs. The offsprings that will hatch from these eggs are finally different enough to be considered a new species after millions of years of more and more different offsprings than the first ones. What is this new species? The chickens of course. So the answer is, the egg. Even though the first chicken egg was not laid by a chicken, the embryo inside was the first chicken to ever be. This chicken will mate with other early chickens of its parent's kind resulting in the pure chicken appearing.

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