Science answers the question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Lesley Ciarula Taylor Staff Reporter

Scientists wielding a powerful supercomputer have cracked the mystery of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

The short answer: the chicken.

The long answer is contained in the analysis called Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by Eggshell Protein by British scientists Colin Freeman and John Harding of the University of Sheffield and David Quigley and P. Mark Rodger of the University of Warwick, published in the current journal Angewandte Chemie.

“It had long been suspected that the egg came first, but now we have the scientific proof that shows in fact the chicken came first,” said Freeman.

Sort of.

What came first was a particular chicken protein found in the bird’s ovaries that governs crystal growth and how it spawns an eggshell overnight.

The protein ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) is found only in the hard part of the shell, but scientists have long wondered what its role has been in the creation of calcite crystals and an eggshell.

Using the U.K. national supercomputer in Edinburgh to simulate how the protein clamps on to a surface, the researchers also noticed that OC-17 sometimes just falls off on its own.

The research took 5 million core hours of computer simulations using a tool called metadynamics, the team reported.

What evolves is “an incredibly elegant process” of formation, detaching and more formation that manages to produce an eggshell within 24 hours.

That knowledge, said Harding, “can also give clues towards designing new materials and processes.”

Whether the Warwich-Sheffield solution definitively answers the age-old conundrum remains to be seen.

A few years ago, a British geneticist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer pooled their resources and concluded that the egg came first. The first egg to have the DNA of a chicken would hatch into a chicken, said professor John Brookfield of the University of Nottingham in 2006.

Chimed in scientific philosophy professor David Papineau of King’s College London:

“If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.”

Brookfield and Papineau were speaking at the behest of Disney as a promotion for the film Chicken Little. But their theory has been the prevailing one.

According to How Stuff Works, “Two non-chickens mated and the DNA in their new zygote contained the mutation(s) that produced the first true chicken. Prior to that first true chicken zygote, there were only non-chickens.”

Alice Shirrell Kaswell took a different tack in her 2003 experiment. Using the U.S. Postal Service, she separately mailed a chicken and an egg.

The chicken arrived first.