An age-old question that is often asked as a riddle: Which came first? Chicken or egg? If you say chicken, the question arises which egg did the first chicken hatch from? And if you say egg, the question arises which chicken laid the first egg? And perhaps, the most controversial question about eggs is whether eggs are vegetarian or non-vegetarian? let me teach you the mystery of eggs.
What is the mystery of an egg? About 150 million years ago, when the earth was ruled by dinosaurs. Small dinosaurs, big dinosaurs, dinosaurs that ran, dinosaurs that flew. This was the time when due to evolution, some dinosaurs started getting smaller and birds started evolving. The first birds evolved around this time. And as I told you in the earlier videos, evolution doesn’t happen in a linear direction. It can happen in any direction, wherever it fits. So, some dinosaurs evolved into scarier dinosaurs like T-Rex and some dinosaurs got smaller and evolved into birds. This is why it is said that the common chicken today and the dinosaur T-Rex had a common ancestor.
In fact, the T-Rex’s closest living relatives are present-day chickens and ostriches. Look at an ostrich closely some time they give off a lot of dinosaur vibes because of this. And all dinosaurs used to lay eggs like these ostriches and chickens. In fact, even before the birds evolved, dinosaurs used to lay eggs. Among animals, the art of laying eggs is ancient. 375 million years ago, when this animal named Tiktaalik Roseae, came out of the water and started living on land, it laid eggs too. But the eggs laid by it did not look like the chicken eggs today. Here, you need to imagine the eggs laid by fish. They do not have an outer shell. This animal must have laid some similar eggs. So if we talk about chicken eggs and such, which have a hard outer membrane, a shell, their evolution took place around 300 million years ago. And if we compare these eggs with a chicken, then the evolution of chicken took place only 3,500 years ago.
You heard it right, around 1500 BC. In Southeast Asia, people started farming rice and millet. A large quantity of grains were grown, which attracted a wild animal living in the nearby jungle. This animal was a wild red jungle fowl, which looks like this, very similar to a chicken. But the difference is that it lived in the jungles of Southeast Asia. When humans started farming, it started living near the farms because of the grains.
And around this time, humans started domesticating it. Because of this domestication, it evolved through thousands of years, and it evolved into today’s chicken. This species of jungle fowl is still alive. You can still find it in the jungles of Southeast Asia. But if you compare it to a common chicken, you can see some differences. The scientific name for this jungle fowl species is Gallus Gallus. And the scientific name for a common chicken is Gallus Gallus Domesticus. So one thing is clear here that eggs are 300 million years old and chicken is 3,500 years old. So eggs evolved much earlier than chicken. But you will say that the 300 million years old eggs were not laid by a chicken.
So the next question here is, did chicken come first or chicken’s eggs? If you want to guess the answer to this question, you can pause the reading and write it in the comments. It is not so difficult to get to the answer if you understand the stages of evolution. It’s very simple. Chicken evolved from wild red jungle fowl. This wild red jungle fowl must have evolved from another animal. Let’s call that animal a proto-chicken. The ancestors of the chicken. So, there must have been a point in time when two proto-chickens mated. During reproduction, there must have been genetic mutations. And due to this, an egg was formed from which the first true red jungle fowl was born. And in the same way, the first chicken must have been born too. The combination of two proto-chickens’ DNA created the first true chicken DNA. This evolution process occurs only during reproduction. It is only after this that the true chicken would have laid more eggs giving birth to more chickens. So the answer to this question is very clear. The egg came first. And this egg was not laid by a chicken.
But it was given by an ancestor species of a chicken, which was almost like a chicken. When can an animal species be called a chicken and when should it not be called a chicken? There is a big grey area here. This line that has been drawn, it has been drawn by humans. The real differences, must have emerged after many generations. What are the forces of evolution that make evolution possible? So, overall, I want to say that it’s not like there was a day in history when the first chicken was born. As if, on 3rd December 1500 BC, two jungle fowls mated and laid an egg and that egg contained the first chicken. Evolution is not like that. This process is gradual, stage by stage, generation by generation. Later in the blog, when I will tell you about artificial selection, you will understand better. Before that, let’s know whether an egg is vegetarian or non-vegetarian. Some people will say that the answer is obvious. Eggs contain life.
A baby hatches from the egg. So, obviously, the egg is non-vegetarian. But the thing is, friends, eggs are of two types. Haploid eggs are the unfertilized eggs which contain only the female sex cells. These eggs can never produce a baby. The other type is Diploid eggs, which are produced after mating. Here, male cells fertilize female sex cells and babies hatch from these eggs. And we often associate this process of fertilization with reproduction. But do you know that there are many plants many plants and animal species that can reproduce without fertilization too? This is called Parthenogenesis and in these cases, even an unfertilized egg can give birth to a new life. It can become a new baby. Speaking of life, do you know that every 5 minutes in India, an Indian is diagnosed with blood cancer or a blood disorder? And your small and simple action can save their lives.
We get to see this in plant species like pineapple and banana plants. And among animals in, lizards, zebra sharks, and rattlesnakes, we can see this parthenogenesis. This word comes from the words Parthenos + Genesis, which means Virgin + Creation. A Virgin Creation taking place. Without sperm, an unfertilized egg is developing into an embryo. So the question here is, can we see parthenogenesis in chickens? The straight answer to this is no. An unfertilized chicken egg cannot give become a chick. And most of the eggs we eat are unfertilized. Some of you may be thinking, that you saw a blood spot while eating an egg. You might assume that that egg was fertilized. But there is no need to worry about that either. Because that’s not true. When a hen lays eggs, some small blood vessels near the ovaries sometimes burst and rupture. So the drops of blood are from there. Those of you who regularly eat eggs must have noticed these blood spots. But now you don’t have to worry that a chick might hatch from the egg. So back to our question, you must have understood that eggs can be vegetarian or non-vegetarian. But most of the eggs that we eat are unfertilized, so they are vegetarian. Because these eggs neither have any meat nor can a life emerge from them. These eggs can be compared to milk. Mahatma Gandhi said the same thing.
Those who drink milk should not have any problem with these sterile, unfertilized eggs. And the same point was reiterated by the Supreme Court in 2004. The court was hearing a matter about whether eggs should be allowed to be sold in religious places like Rishikesh or not. Supreme Court held that eggs are vegetarian. Overall, eggs are a highly nutritious food. It has a lot of protein. Vitamin B12, B2, B5, Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Selenium, Calcium, Iron, Potassium, Zinc, Manganese, Vitamin E, Antioxidants. It’s full of a lot of nutrients. This is why the Indian government used to run ads to encourage people to eat eggs daily. This was a good food source to fight malnutrition.
Now, some eggs are brown and some are white. And people think that brown eggs are healthier than white eggs because brown bread is healthier than white bread. But actually, this is not the case with eggs. The difference between white and brown is due to the breed of the chicken. The breed of the chicken laying the egg. And nutritionally, both brown and white eggs are very similar to each other. Another interesting thing to know here is that today, chickens lay around 200-300 eggs in a year. But their ancestors, the Red Jungle Fowl, only laid around 10-15 eggs in a year. How did this happen? What was the force of evolution that made chickens evolve in a way that they lay more eggs? The answer is, friends, here, natural selection played no role at all. Here, evolution occured due to artificial selection. Due to human interference. Humans practised selective breeding of chickens. Thousands of years ago, a person might have noticed a chicken laying more eggs.
Selectively, that chicken was bred to have an offspring that laid even more eggs. It was done to the next generation too. This kept on repeating again and again. Artificial selection was carried out by humans which led to the present-day situation where a chicken lays 200-300 eggs a year. Many people will find this human intervention unnatural. But humans do this artificial selection in cows and buffaloes as well. The cow that gives more milk is artificially bred by farmers. Or some other hereditary traits that are more beneficial to farmers are selectively bred so that it is more prominent in future generations. Now, hearing this, the vegans would say, that this is a reason why we should not consume milk. Because humans keep interfering everywhere. Humans have bred these animals for their own benefit. But the thing is, friends, humans have not only bred animals like this but have also bred trees and plants by artificial selection. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage all these vegetables have evolved from wild mustard plants after thousands of years of artificial selection. Had you eaten a banana from a banana plant 7,000 years ago firstly, it would’ve been smaller.
Secondly, once you peeled the banana to eat it you would have seen many black seeds in it. There were so many seeds in a banana that it would’ve been difficult to eat it. Like a present-day pomegranate. In this photo, you can see, what bananas looked like back then. When humans started the artificial breeding of bananas, they chose the fruits with fewer seeds. After repeatedly choosing it, these seeds have now gone extinct after thousands of years. And we can eat these big yellow bananas which have no seeds. If you think about it, artificial breeding must have been natural initially. If you see an apple tree, and you see an apple that is the biggest, reddest and juiciest of all, and you get a chance to grow an apple tree in your garden, obviously, you will choose the seed of the fruit to grow the new tree the fruit which was the biggest, juiciest, and reddest. On the other hand, some people argue that this entire thing is unnatural. Since humans started farming, agriculture was unnatural in itself. 12,000 years ago, the time when agriculture began. Before that, humans lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Living in the jungle, killing small animals, or eating fruits from trees. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari states that 10,000 years ago wheat was merely a wild grass which was found in some regions of the Middle East. But in the last few thousand years, wheat has spread so much all across the world that now, wheat occupies 2.25 million square kilometres of the earth’s surface. Homo Erectus, who were the ancestors of humans, I had mentioned them in my second video on evolution. They were living comfortably for 2 million years without farming.
And when the domestication of wheat began around 8000 BC, Homo Sapiens were also living comfortably for 200,000 years without farming. But because of wheat, we cut down trees, started farming, and we made clear fields because wheat didn’t like stones and rocky area. We removed different weed plants from the fields because wheat did not like them. We brought buckets full of water from the rivers to irrigate the fields because wheat needed a lot of water to grow. We used new techniques to drive away insects and pests because wheat did not like insects and pests. Natural insecticides were first used about 4,500 years ago by the Sumerians, who used sulfur compounds to drive away insects and pests during farming. Yuval Noah Harari says in his book that when humans started domesticating wheat it was wheat that domesticated humans because humans changed their lives to farm. Now another question arises here. What is natural and what is unnatural? What is good for the earth, good for nature and what is not? Should you be a vegetarian or a vegan or a non-vegetarian?