The six-year old scientist
Oct. 21st, 2005 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chromodynamicsMy son (6) was talking about chicken eggs with his grandmother (they boiled an egg to see the bubbles so she could demonstrate porosity) and I started to sing that age-old refrain, "Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" To which my son immediately responded, "The Chicken!" I replied, "Are you sure? Then where did the chicken come from?" To which he again immediately responded, "The dinosaurs!"
How I love my little scientist.
How I love my little scientist.
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Date: 2005-10-21 03:40 pm (UTC)If you want to impress your son, there's an actual scientific answer for the chicken-and-egg question. It has to do with the mechnism of evolution.
The modern chicken evolved from some immediate ancestor, call it a proto-chicken. The proto-chicken evolved and mutated until at some point, some chicken laid an egg that contained a chicken that was sufficiently different to qualify as a new species, the modern chicken. The mother was a proto-chicken, the egg she laid was a modern chicken. Therefore, the egg came first!