Science reveals one of life's enigmas: did the chicken or the egg come first?

'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?' is a question that, although quite common, has crossed the minds of philosophers and scientists and many minds for centuries.

This popular riddle is actually an old debate dating back to Ancient Greece. , where thinkers such as Aristotle dedicated themselves to reflecting on the origin of life and the Universe. This discussion touches on fields such as science, philosophy, and even cosmology, although many biologists firmly assert that the egg came first.

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However, a group of scientists from the University of Geneva, Switzerland , led by Professor Omaya Dudin , claims in a study published in the journal 'Nature' that the basic components of egg cells appeared long before the evolution of chickens, essentially stating that the egg came first than the chicken .

The above conclusion is in line with the scientific perspective of the debate, which shows that from an evolutionary point of view the egg came first , since birds evolved from reptiles, while the appearance of the oviparous reproduction process (laying eggs) is prior to the appearance of chickens, so the egg would be an evolutionary adaptation of these birds.

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To reach this conclusion, scientists analyzed a single-celled species called Chromosphaera perkinskii , which was discovered in 2017 in marine sediments off the island of Hawaii and whose presence on the planet dates back more than 1 billion years, long before the first animals appeared.

In their notes, they discovered that this single-celled species builds multicellular structures that are very similar to animal embryos . Not only are cell divisions and the three-dimensional structure they form similar to the early stages of animal embryonic development, but their genetic activity is also synchronized with these.

The debate was resolved

" Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes were already present in the species, long before the first animals appeared on Earth ," Dudin said, as quoted by National Geographic.

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In fact, previous studies indicate that hard-shelled eggs, like those of chickens, probably didn't appear until about 300 million years ago . The solution to this puzzle lies in the fact that the genetic programs that govern multicellular development, like those of the chicken and egg, may have been in place more than 1 billion years ago, according to the research.

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