Science & Technology

Have scientists finally solved the 'chicken or the egg' paradox?

By T.K. Randall
November 19, 2024

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) What came first, the chicken or the egg ? It remains a popular mind-bending question with no clear answer - if the chicken came first then what did it hatch out of and if the egg came first, what laid the egg ?

While the question itself is more of a rhetorical critical thinking exercise than a serious question, a new discovery by scientists at the University of Geneva could actually serve to offer up an answer.

It concerns a strange type of Ichthyosporean microbe called Chromosphaera perkinsii that lives beneath shallow sea floors and has the unusual trait of closely resembling an animal embryo when it reproduces.Given that this organism was around for over a billion years before the emergence of animals, it represents the proverbial 'egg' as it were, which existed long before the chicken.

"Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth," said biochemist Omaya Dudin of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

In other words, it shows that life developed the 'programming' for eggs before eggs were even a thing.

"Our study indicates that C. perkinsii represents a transitional form between temporal and spatial cell differentiation, providing insights into the evolutionary mechanisms that led to emergence of animal multicellularity," the study authors wrote.

Source: Science Alert

Tags: Egg, Chicken