A site that describes its mission by saying that “we want to aware every one of the latest developments in different scientific disciplines and the pillar concepts on which the basis of science are laid” has at last revealed the answer to the ancient question, “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?”

The site tells us that this is the answer given by science, and therefore definitive. According to researchers who did research, “the protein which makes egg shells is only produced by chickens and not the other way around, so the egg can only exist if it has been created inside a chicken. Therefore, it’s the chicken that came first, not the egg.”

This is an interesting, if badly expressed (what does “the other way around” mean?), piece of reasoning. But it is not science: it is philosophy. How do we know the difference? A philosophical proposition may be defined as “a proposition whose exact contrary may be, and in fact is, held by other sane thinkers”—as opposed to a scientific proposition, to refute which it is necessary to do science.

In this case everything depends on what we mean by egg. At this moment, there is a nest of robins on the windowsill outside. The young hatched from eggs; they were not chicken eggs, but they were eggs. Young turtles hatch from eggs. Young dinosaur ancestors of chickens hatched from eggs. As a fact of nature, the egg existed before the chicken. A hundred million years AP (ante pullum), there were eggs. The egg came first.

This is not complicated philosophy, by the way: this answer was given to Dr. Boli by a ten-year-old child, from whom he borrows it with thanks.

Well, then we mean a chicken egg. But here is a simple argument from evolutionary biology for the contrary proposition, even assuming that definition. Speciation proceeds by degrees, but at some point a mutation occurred that created the first chicken rather than proto-chicken. That mutation was in an embryo in an egg laid by a proto-chicken. Therefore, it was an egg before it was a chicken—quod erat demonstrandum.

Incidentally, that other site’s conclusion seems to be the writer’s extrapolation from the abstract of a study that does not necessarily articulate that conclusion itself. Dr. Boli decided not to pay $59 for the whole study in PDF form, and he suspects that the writer at that other site made a similarly frugal decision.

On the same site, you can read “Wearing The Same Shirt Everyday Is A Sign Of Genius, Psychologist Suggests.” This, again, is presented as science, but again it is philosophy. It is quite possible to argue for the contrary proposition: Wearing the same shirt every day is a sign of being too stupid to operate the washing machine.