WHICH CAME FIRST?

I always thought if it as more of a joke, but evidently a number of people have been concerned over the years to ascertain which came first, the chicken or the egg.

One of those people is Dr. Colin Freeman at Sheffield University. He and some friends at Warwick University (I have never heard of either of these schools)decided to find out "scientifically" the correct answer. (Here imagine Yule Brenner saying "it's scientifice!" in The King and I)

The good doctor used the UK Science Research Council's super-computer (High End Computing Terascale Resource). He "inputted" the chemical composition of eggshells so see what the computer would do with it. Hopefully, it would not lay an egg in the metaphorical sense.

The computer results showed the researchers that a protein, ovocledidin-17 or OC-17, is a key piece in the formation of egg shells. OC-17 exists only in chicken ovaries.

Of course, Dr. Freeman had to take a stab at an evolutionary explanation. He said the ancestors of chickens evolved to create hard eggs around the time of the dinosaurs. The yoke is on you if you think he has a scientific basis for that one. I think it more likely scenario is his fear that his finding would contradict the theory of evolution. You had to have a chicken programmed to produce eggs in order to have subsequent generations of chickens.

Side note: I wonder if the people that ate all the dinosaurs and made them extinct said "it tastes like chicken" when they at them.

The reason I did not spend any time of the supposed condundrum of the chicken and egg is that I had a theological answer. Genesis 1 tells us God created all the living creatures, blessed them and and told them to be fruitful and increase in number. He did not create eggs. He created a chicken to make eggs.

So, the chicken came first.

God make the chicken. Even more, he made a chicken programmed to reproduce its kind and multiply according to his word, down to the little detail of putting a chemical in the female's ovaries that caused the shell to be form and harden and protect the little one.

God pays a lot of attention to detail.

I love that about him.