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Asked by tonje to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by bethelunssy, alex1996, tisazawa, gingerninja2011.
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Sara Imari Walker answered on 14 Jun 2011:
Hey tonje! Is this a trick question?? Lol. I like your style 😉
We have this great theory describing how new species have arisen over the past 3.5 billion years of the history of life on Earth called Darwinian evolution. It describes how new species arise over time by variation in living organsims and selection for different traits. All life on Earth shares A LOT in common: a common genetic code, common macromolecules like DNA and protein to name a few. It is therefore believed that all life descended from a last universal common ancestor, the LUCA, which lived on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago (this is not a single organism but more like a bunch of them with common genetic makeup). LUCA was a microbe and from it through the process of evolution all life we see today arose. Beautiful isn’t it? Well, within this picture egg-laying species predate chickens! So I guess eggs came first and later chickens =)
But I like your question because it is actually a very deep philosophical one we usually use in science in the context of how life started in the universe. Evolution tells us how we get from something like LUCA to modern life. But it doesn’t tell us where LUCA came from. That chicken-or-egg question is exactly what my research is about. Pretty fun stuff! But sometimes and can make your head spin =D
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Kimberley Bryon answered on 14 Jun 2011:
A great philosophical question. I remember reading somewhere that the chicken had to come first because you can’t get an eggshell to form without a chicken.
But if we were going for a non-chicken egg, Sara is right, other creatures laid eggs before chickens existed 😛
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Amy MacQueen answered on 14 Jun 2011:
As Sara said evolution tells us about the process but not about where life itself came from initially at the very start. It really doesn’t answer the question of “how did life start”? is this a question science can answer? Did someone create life or did it arise spontaneously? Good things to think about!!
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Drew Rae answered on 14 Jun 2011:
If you follow Sara’s logic, the very first thing that you could call a chicken hatched from an egg, so it was definitely the egg that came first.
When they first asked this question, it was really about how the whole cycle of life got started. There are some fairly basic chemical reactions that allow natural selection, even before you have something that you could fully call life. That’s one path to life. As far as we know, it’s only ever happened once – but it could have happened lots of times on earth and the others just didn’t make it, or got wiped out by our successful tree of life.
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