Steve GannScience Answers The Chicken vs Egg Mystery
July 15th 2010 22:21
I'm happy to announce that we can now move on to the next serious dilemma. A group of scientists in Britain have now declared a winner in the debate.
Sorry egg, but these scientists say that the chicken did indeed arrive first.
How did they come to this startling conclusion?
It all has to do with a protein called ovocledidin-17 that is found in both eggshells and chicken's ovaries.
Colin Freeman, from the University of Sheffield in northern England and colleagues from the University of Warwick used Britain's national supercomputer, a machine dubbed HECToR, to simulate the process of biomineralization, or the production of minerals on solid materials inside organisms.
It was a world first and revealed that one potential purpose of the protein ovocledidin-17 is to speed up the production of eggshell within the chicken so that in 24 hours an egg is ready to be laid.
"What we have really identified is that the protein seems to accelerate the crystallization process so it can make that eggshell appear far quicker. In simple terms it accelerates calcite formation," Freeman said.
They also found that the egg can't be produced without the protein ovocledidin-17 in the chickens' ovaries, so that means that the chicken must have come first. Right?
"Obviously, it's not really what we were trying to get out of our simulations, but it's an interesting question isn't it?" Freeman said.
I guess the next tough question to be answered is that pesky tree falling in the forest problem.
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