Cracking on with the chicken-or-egg row

For millennia, scientists have chickened out of the “which comes first” debate perhaps fearing egg on their faces. Scientifically speaking, eggs in general predate birds in general, but the case of the chicken or the egg has largely been left to philosophers and thinkers to give it the once ova. From Aristotle to Diderot, great minds have been unable to come to any conclusion, so it has had to fall to the lot of modern science to finally crack the conundrum. However, scientists recently determining that a “near chicken” laid an egg from which the genetic mother hen of all current chooks emerged will probably not put an end to the matter. After all, an earlier bunch of boffins had “discovered” that only chicken ovaries had the material to make a certain protein for chicken egg shells, thereby asserting the primacy of the poulet.

Scientists, undoubtedly, will persist till they get a definitive answer whereas philosophers may be happy with their oneoeuf observations. But in the meantime, advances in the fertility field could make eggs redundant to the entire procreation process, so the “chicken or egg first” question may become irrelevant for future generations of living creatures who will owe their existence to cloned cells in Petri dishes. Still, since omelettes can’t be made without breaking eggs (so far), let both philosophers and scientists crack on, we say!