This thread will never die. Congrats to its creator for posting the perfect topic.
As for the Protein thing, could this not simply be a mutation? If the ancesters of the modern chicken had the first creature classifiable as a chicken, could that first creature simply have had odd genes which created the protein?
Logical the answer would be the chicken. The chicken came first and made the egg and the whole cycle begins. Religiously it would also be the chicken. God made the chicken, the chicken laid the egg and so on and so on. I don't now what the answer would be scientifically counting the whole evolutionary process and all, but I found the Wikipedia page and I found it pretty interesting.
Scientificly, it's still the chicken. The chicken egg can't live without a chicken mother and can't be made without it. But it is possible that the chicken egg was developed by a close relative of the chicken. Then you could "technicly" say the egg. But I would still call it a chicken.
Why can't it be some freaky bird that wasn't a chicken that had an egg and the egg mutated into a baby chick?
It wouldn't be a "freaky bird" mutations take place over long periods of time due to adaptions and changes in the environment. Therefore, if the egg came first, then the parent would look most like a chicken. But if this were true then we have to say what defines a chicken.
And where did I say that the freaky bird couldn't look mostly like a chicken, hmm?
I was just saying the parent would look almost exactly like a chicken, but with extremely slight genetic differences. I wasn't sure exactly what you meant by freaky, sorry.
The egg. According to evolution, the egg would have been laid by something almost exactly like a chicken, but not quite. The egg would have a small mutation, and hatching from it would be... a chicken.
