Posted on 07/15/2010 5:17:18 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Scientists wielding a powerful supercomputer have cracked the mystery of which came first, the chicken or the egg.
The short answer: the chicken.
The long answer is contained in the analysis called Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by Eggshell Protein by British scientists Colin Freeman and John Harding of the University of Sheffield and David Quigley and P. Mark Rodger of the University of Warwick, published in the current journal Angewandte Chemie.
“It had long been suspected that the egg came first, but now we have the scientific proof that shows in fact the chicken came first,” said Freeman.
Sort of.
What came first was a particular chicken protein found in the bird’s ovaries that governs crystal growth and how it spawns an eggshell overnight.
The protein ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) is found only in the hard part of the shell, but scientists have long wondered what its role has been in the creation of calcite crystals and an eggshell.
Using the U.K. national supercomputer in Edinburgh to simulate how the protein clamps on to a surface, the researchers also noticed that OC-17 sometimes just falls off on its own.
The research took 5 million core hours of computer simulations using a tool called metadynamics, the team reported.
What evolves is “an incredibly elegant process” of formation, detaching and more formation that manages to produce an eggshell within 24 hours.
That knowledge, said Harding, “can also give clues towards designing new materials and processes.”
Whether the Warwich-Sheffield solution definitively answers the age-old conundrum remains to be seen.
A few years ago, a British geneticist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer pooled their resources and concluded that the egg came first. The first egg to have the DNA of a chicken would hatch into a chicken, said professor John Brookfield of the University of Nottingham in 2006.
Chimed in scientific philosophy professor David Papineau of King’s College London:
“If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.”
Brookfield and Papineau were speaking at the behest of Disney as a promotion for the film Chicken Little. But their theory has been the prevailing one.
According to How Stuff Works, “Two non-chickens mated and the DNA in their new zygote contained the mutation(s) that produced the first true chicken. Prior to that first true chicken zygote, there were only non-chickens.”
Alice Shirrell Kaswell took a different tack in her 2003 experiment. Using the U.S. Postal Service, she separately mailed a chicken and an egg.
The chicken arrived first.
You know who came first the man
Lizards came before birds and fish before lizards. Both lizards and fish lay eggs. Therefore, the egg came before the chicken.
Yes. Genesis tells us the chicken came first. There can be no other authority or opinion.
5 million supercomputer hours in Britain. Probably used half their education budget. It’s a wonder they didn’t come up with a rubber chicken...
lol - That came to my mind as well.
And then, as usual, immediately rolled over snoring.
OK, fair enuff. But what came before that, the two non-chickens or the two non-chicken eggs ??? ..... and it goes on and on and on .... certainly there is room for mutations, but I reckon you're right that it always will lead back to Genesis
The answer to the question chicken or egg is very easy and would not take a super duper computer at all.
it was The Rooster
:-)
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
If you don’t have a chicken to sit on the eggs, they stay eggs.
No chickee, no hatchee. No hatchee, no chickee.
Except that birds — at least the prehistoric ones — were decidedly reptilian.
http://www.britannica.com/facts/11/774887/reptile-as-discussed-in-bird
What I want to know is who was the first man that looked at a chicken and said, “I’m going to eat the first thing that comes out of that chicken’s butt.”
Supercomputers may have tens of thousands of cores. This might have amounted to a couple hundred supercomputer hours.
According to the Big Bang Theory, the whole Universe was just an egg. A very, very tiny one, and very heavy. But an egg nonetheless.
So, WE ARE THE CHICKEN.
I've often wondered at the first man who ate a lobster. The guy must have been starving to death, I can almost hear him say, "To hell with it, I'm going to toss this thing in boiling water and eat it, I don't care how ugly it is!".
WHO GIVES A CRAP!?
The question is what came first, the CHICKEN or the egg...not what came first the prehistoric reptilian bird or the egg.
sheesh.
Then he’s not doing it right
I AM THE WALRUS
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