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Cake day: March 11th, 2024

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  • As others have said, this is a side discussion inspired by the headline but not really related to the article.

    That said, there is no proto-chicken that laid a chicken egg or a chicken hatching out of a proto-chicken egg. There was no “first chicken.” Populations evolve, not individuals. Let’s not confuse a de novo mutation with evolution. Evolution is a change in allele frequencies over time, and speciation is reproductive isolation of populations experiencing allele frequency shifts.

    There are still population-wide polymorphisms in humans that are present in gorillas but have been fixed in chimpanzees. Populations of proto-chickens gradually evolved into chickens, but if there were a hard line to define the distinction (like the wavelength where orange ends), then there would have been a long time of proto-chickens and chickens interbreeding and their descendents oscillating back and forth between the two definitions over generations.