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While at Denny’s restaurant one night, I was talking with a friend in a somewhat inebriated state when our conversation turned to the age old conundrum, which came first, the chicken or the egg. For those who are too impatient to read on- the egg came first.
So, shocker eh? Well, what we are discussing is how the common form of the chicken as we know it came about. Evolution is an ongoing process that occurs within every generation of species. It is simply a genetic fault that causes a mutation in a creatures DNA. Sometimes these mutations are beneficial for an animal’s survival, like, ‘hey, wow, I have claws now, let me see if I can stick them into the innards of a gazelle’. So these millions of defects are passed over thousands of generations to give us what we have today, chickens. However, with that being said, we can argue that the chicken isn’t even the chicken because it is constantly being evolved even as we speak. So for simplicity’s sake, we will confine our argument to one specific instance of the chicken’s development.
Here is the argument: a mutation can occur at any time during the development of an animal, either while still in the egg, or after it hatches, sometime during its life. So now we have this instance of a chicken carrying a genetic defect in its DNA ready to pass it on to the next generation over a sloppy night of tequila shots and that hen named Helen, who it always thought would be cute if she shed a few ounces.
That means that the new version of the chicken comes into existence when conception occurs. While it can be argued that the chicken that had the initial mutation came first, but it is more of a mixed breed of the previous instance of the animal and the new version, rather than the whole new version that occurs at the next egg.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish over French toast with two eggs over medium.
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