Agencies
 
London, May 26: It’s an age-old debate: What came first, the chicken or the egg? A British scientist says it was the egg. And he has the backing of a philosopher and a chicken farmer.

According to the scientist, Prof. John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, it’s very simple. The bird, which has now evolved into a chicken, would have first existed as an embryo inside the egg during pre-historic times.

"Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a member of the species would be this first egg," he was quoted across British dailies. "So, I would conclude that the egg came first."

Brookfield’s views have been endorsed by Prof David Papineau of King's College London, and Charles Bourns, a poultry farmer and the chairman of a trade body called Great British Chicken.

Papineau, whose subject is the philosophy of science, have also reached the conclusion that the first chicken came from an egg and that proves there were chicken eggs before chickens.

Papineau says that those argue that the mutant egg belonged to the "non-chicken" parents, are mistaken.

"I would argue that it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it," he was quoted as saying. "If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."

The poultry farmer Bourns also belongs to the eggs’ side. "Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived," he stated.