Which really came first

So, eggs dramatically predate chickens. As humans consistently chose the tamest red junglefowls and bred them together, the genetic makeup of the resulting birds will have shifted. At some stage during this domestication process the red junglefowl Gallus gallus evolved into a new subspecies, Gallus gallus domesticus , AKA the chicken.

In practice, it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when this happened. But in theory, at some point two junglefowl bred and their offspring was genetically different enough from the species of its parents to be classified as a chicken.

A few years ago a group of scientists did write about how a particular protein required for chicken egg shell formation was only found in chicken ovaries.

The story starts in Ancient Greece. Aristotle was clearly thinking about this type of question, says Sorensen, though he escaped having to answer it by saying that both went infinitely backward and had always existed.

Christian philosophers like Augustine and St. After all, understanding the question based strictly on Genesis, the chicken would come first. It is stated in the sacred books that the hen existed first. These books teach that animals were created at the beginning of the world; hence the hen did not come from the egg but from nothing. By the 18th century, however, things were changing.

Even as the science is pretty much resolved, philosophers continue to engage with the matter. Clearly, the question remains a fruitful starting-point for all sorts of meditations—including this one. They claim it was the egg who came first and did so through mutation. In other words, a non-Chicken laid an egg that was somehow genetically changed to produce the first Chicken. But, physics says otherwise. We usually take time as a given, that it is real and flows in succession.

The Chicken past who laid the egg present who becomes the Chicken future are one and the same. According to Bohm, the world we experience around us, the eggs, Chickens, and ourselves, only appear separate but are actually explicit manifestations of a deeper implicit order. Now ordinarily we say, tacitly, that that is me.

But that is really only an explicit image of something much more subtle and enfolded. Venn diagrams representing the specific and overlapping proteins identified in the human during the whole gestation and chicken 11th day of incubation amniotic fluid AF. Human AF data were obtained from the work of Cho et al. The egg that you hold in your hand was generated by the same wholeness from which you were generated.

You and the egg are deeply entangled in the universe. Physics is not the only science to recognize patterns of continuity which underlie and cohere all of us. Neuroscience does not delve into the implicit, invisible realms which quantum physics reveals, however, it describes the continuity in the explicit, tangible world.