Posted on 07/15/2010 6:40:02 AM PDT by decimon
One of the most puzzling and famous life questions has stumped people for generations. It's the question of which came first: the chicken or the egg? In order for there to be an egg, a chicken would have had to lay it. In order for there to be a chicken, it would have had to hatch from an egg. It seems as though either answer could be the correct answer; until now.
Dr. Colin Freeman from Sheffield University along with colleagues from Warwick University have figured it all out. Their research project originally aimed to figure out how animals make eggshells because it's an extraordinarily strong yet lightweight material that no human has been able to replicate, and the researchers hoped to learn how to develop a manmade equivalent by learning about the way animals make eggshells.
Chickens were chosen as their test subjects simply because the protein was easy to study. The study began when Freeman and his colleagues used the UK Science Research Council's super-computer called HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resource), which is based in Edinburgh. The "ingredients" used to make eggshells were programmed into HECToR, and that was it. The computer was left to produce results on its own, and it took weeks for HECToR to figure out how chickens make eggshells.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytech.com ...
It’s a really really stupid question. The egg obviously came first.
I always thought that this was a dumb question! The chicken had to come first for a couple of reasons.
# 1- God created animals, even before man, WHOLE animals.
# 2- An egg would not hatch just lying around, it would need warmth and care from a hen or other creature.
So, the chicken HAD to come first!
God created the chicken.
But who laid that egg?
As a software engineer it always makes me laugh when I hear people quote “The computer model says that [...]”
The computer is giving the exact output it was programmed to give.
If you let me at the code for a little while I can make it give the exact opposite answer.
I find it humorous when scientists base their conclusions solely on models, too. They may understand the answer the model gave, but most of the time do not understand either the question that was asked or the fact it was the wrong question!
But what if eggs were brought to earth by space aliens?
“I think the egg came first. A chicken is not defined by the type of egg it lays. (A horse is a horse even if it gives birth to a mule.) But an egg is defined by the kind of creature it contains. (An egg that contains a robin is a ‘robin’ egg, no matter what laid it.) Therefore, if you believe in evolution, at some point a creature which was almost a chicken laid an egg that contained a chicken, and as an egg is defined by the kind of creature it contains, the egg came first.”
— Marilyn vos Savant in her book, Ask Marilyn
Of course, if you don’t think evolution is true, the question is essentially meaningless.
Evolution aside, I think Marilyn laid an egg with that babble.
Dinosaurs.
Man created the chicken. It’s a a domestication of both red and grey jungle fowl.
Close on the heels of the reasearch study that produced these amazing findings will be another government funded research study to determine why the chicken crossed the road.
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