The Chicken and The Egg

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, has been solved experimentally.

The bad news is that there were two experiments that resulted in opposite answers.

The first experiment involved a geneticist, a philosopher, and a chicken farmer. They reasoned that an animal cannot change its genetic makeup during its own lifetime. Therefore, according to them, the first chicken must have existed with chicken DNA in egg form first. Answer #1: The egg came first.

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/26/chicken.egg/

Acknowledging that I am not a geneticist, a philosopher, or a chicken farmer, I have one question about this study: Don't some animals unilaterally change their sex during their lifetime? Isn't this an example of an animal changing it's genetic makeup during it's lifetime? Maybe this isn't a genetic change, I don't know.

The second experiment involved a chicken, an egg, and the United States Postal Service. The researcher took a carefully and properly packaged chicken and separately packaged egg to the same post office at the same time and mailed them to the same location some 200 miles away.

The researcher then went to the destination to which he had mailed the packages to see which would arrive first. The chicken was the first to arrive. The egg arrived over 11 hours after the chicken. Answer #2: The chicken came first.

Link: http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v9i4/chicken_egg.html

Here I question the statistical accuracy of the experiment. Shouldn't similar experiments have been performed multiple times, and in multiple locations, with multiple points of origin and multiple destinations?

While I applaud the efforts of all those involved, I suppose the waters are just as muddy as ever. We may never know the truth.