Tag Archives: Single Celled Organisms

Chicken or Egg

IMG_20130223_114236
Egg or Chicken, Chicken or Egg?????????

The Matticus Kingdom’s first ever Tug of War

A fantastically fabulous blogger from a magical kingdom has come up with a great idea to challenge the masses, a tug of war.

Always up for a challenge I accept wholeheartedly. The inaugural question was what came first, the chicken or the egg?

This was a softball to me, because of my rudimentary understanding of biology and evolution.  The world has my excellent experience in the public education system of the 1970’s and 80’s to thank for this detailed answer.

The Chicken Wins

The Chicken of Course!!!
The Chicken of Course!!!

There are several arguments I could make. If I believed the religious teachings I heard every Sunday as a youth, God made chickens and chickens make eggs and that is the end of the story.  That would make it simple, even if it makes no sense an leaves a “few” gaps.

That answer never satisfied me so I looked to education for my answer.  As I understand life it worked something like this.

 

There was a Big Bang! (just had to get that reference in here)

Just looking at my drawing. The big bang looks like a fried egg, or a pile of pooh. We'll stick with fried egg. :_)
Just looking at my drawing. The big bang looks like a fried egg, or a pile of pooh. We’ll stick with fried egg. :_)

The Earth and the atmosphere formed.

Life started to evolve.

Life begins
Life begins

Where it came from, now that is debatable but here we are, not debatable. (at least we think we are here)

Life was made up of single cell organisms who due to environmental influences started to evolve over time to become more proficient at survival.

Things started to Evolve
Things started to Evolve

Many forms of life evolved, why they didn’t just all turn into people or monkeys or dinosaurs, or chickens is a bit unclear to me, but what do you expect from a free education.

Now these single celled organisms multiplied through cell division.  Over time cells bonded together to form multicell organisms.  Some of these primitive life forms eventually evolved into chickens.

The Chicken may die, yet the eggs live on.
The Chicken may die, yet the eggs live on.

The early chickens found an evolutionary benefit to developing their young in eggs outside of their bodies, so it is clear that the Chicken definitely came first!