So, I was thinking about this at school, and I thought I'd ask you. I have two questions:

1. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
2. Which came first, thought or language?

The first is well-known. Maybe the second one is too, but most haven't heard of it where I live. I had to explain it to them like this: 

You have to think to speak. Therefore, one would think thoughts came first. BUT you think in words! So... which came first?

Dragonlord Stephi :

The egg came first.

Whatever we call "chicken" is dependent upon what see. What we see will change over time. So 10,000 years in the future, chickens will look totally different, but they will still be "chicken".

The definition of "chicken" depends upon what it looks like.

Also, if we're not talking about language, a chicken is a chicken whether it's an embryo or an adult, so the question is like "What is truly human: a child or an adult?"

Txgangsta : Mm, interesting take. I've never heard someone say that it depends on the language being used- the embryo is a chicken. That's quite clever.

The chicken as we see it today came first and evolved from whatever it came from.

Thought is simply organizing emotions.  Words are created as an expression of thought.  Thought came first, words came second.

The second one is pretty obvious. Thought came before language. A thought is just a reaction to any given stimulus. Language is just a collection of symbols that represent those thoughts. A newborn baby does not have 'language', as they have not learned it. But they certainly have thoughts.

They are both obvious, I think.

1. The egg. There were quite a few egg-layers before the chicken. They created eggs that hatched into other animals.

Not the chicken. The chicken would evolve later. Scientists date some fossilized "eggs" to be as old as 600 million years (example).

2. Thought. Before communication, the mind must think about what to communicate.

So no form of human language could have existed without thought having existed first.

Dragonlord Stephi : I am going to go ahead and debate the 2nd one. You see, even though you need words to think, words are only proportional to the language you are taught. For instance, if I want to think of a dog, I think of it, but everybody can think of a dog, but nobody will think of a dog with the same words. The thought itself is always there, you just don't express the thought until you are taught the word.

Thought vs Language, thought came first. Language is arbitrary noises that we gave meaning to in order to communicate complex things.

However, if we were to say thought vs communication, I'd have to say they are simultaneous. More often than not, a person's body communicates the general thought, whether it be "I am in pain" or "I'm bored".

zanderlex :  

I never thought about it like that. Without language, we might only respond to stimuli instead of forming thoughts.

I'll have to think more about it. Perhaps there's a case where someone never learned language?

You might be right.

Chicken came first. Who or what kept the egg warm to hatch?
Thought came first. See rcarter2's explanation.

The egg, dinosaurs laid eggs and the chicken is a distant relation of a t-rex (just a random bit of trivia)

Thoughts, you would need thought in order to create language, even a grunt would require some thought to make.

ant123ant :  "...and the chicken is a distant relation of a t-rex (just a random bit of trivia)"

You say it like it's a fact.  Don't believe everything you are spoon fed.  Curse the biology books!

There are many problems with dinosaurs "evolving" into birds.  I'm only going to mention one.
Think about it.  Some forget that dinosaurs are in fact reptiles which we know are cold-blooded, while birds and mammals are warm-blooded.  Compared to most mammals, birds have exceptionally high body temperatures resulting from a high metabolic rate.  The difference between cold- and warm-blooded animals is not just in the temperature of their blood, but rather in their ability to maintain a constant body core temperature.  Birds and mammals thus have an internal physiological mechanism to maintain a constant body temperature.  The term here is "endothermic".  In contrast to this, reptiles have a varying body temperature influenced by their surrounding environment and this is called "ectothermic".  These types of animals can adjust their body temperature behaviorally, for example moving between shade and sun.  They can even achieve a higher body temperature than a warm-blooded animal, but this is done by outside factors.
Evolutionists have tried to make the evolution of dinosaurs into birds seem more plausible by arguing that dinosaurs were also endothermic, but there is no clear evidence for this.  One of these lines of evidence is based upon the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones.  Fossil dinosaur bones have been found containing special microscopic structures called osteons.  These osteons are complex concentric layers of bone surrounding blood vessels in areas where bone is dense.  This arrangement is assumed by some to be unique to endothermic animals and thus evidence that dinosaurs are endothermic, but this is not the case.  Larger vertebrates (whether reptiles, birds or mammals) may also have this type of bone.  It has been found that even tuna fish have osteonal bone in their vertebral arches.

Another argument for endothermy in dinosaurs is based on the eggs and assumed brood behavior of dinosaurs.   This too has been challenged.  There is in fact no theropod brooding behavior not known to occur in crocodiles and other cold-blooded living reptiles.
Alan Feduccia who is an expert on birds and their evolution has concluded that “there has never been, nor is there now, any evidence that dinosaurs were endothermic.”  Feduccia also said that despite the lack of evidence “many authors have tried to make specimens conform to the hot-blooded theropod dogma.”

Could you then maybe explain how the chicken can be related to the T-Rex?

SoL@R :

Yes, there are problems with the theory of evolution. That doesn't mean there is no such thing as evolution. There are also problems with the theory of gravity, but I think we all agree on that one.

SoL@R : You are quite mistaken. We do in fact know that many dinosaurs, including the ones that evolved into birds, were endothermic or "warm-blooded" (not a great term to use, but fine), and have known this for over thirty years. Other reptiles in the past have been endothermic as well. For example, early crocodilians were both terrestrial and had high metabolic rates. As they were outcompeted by dinosaurs, they retreated into more aquatic environments and became ectothermic as they no longer needed that higher level of activity. In other words, how an animal heats its body is determined by the conditions it is in, not by its class.

Incidentally, tuna are somewhat endothermic as well.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v238/n5359/abs/238081a0.html
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/422766?uid=3739400&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4&sid=21103742119097

1st:  The egg was always my choice when asked which came first.  Some flying dinosaurs were chicken sized and I believe they may be related.

2nd: Language is my answer.  The question is less common.  Thought is a compelling choice but language can be easier for early man to master IMO.

cyks : If I had to pick, I would believe it'd be thought. You'd need thought to even form a grunt. But it's my opinion they were around at the same time. 

A lot of people bring up the dinosaur-chicken common ancestry and say it's the egg first. But, cyks, just because dinosaurs are chicken-sized does not mean they are related (I am not an evolutionist, but even one would agree- most of their 'evidence' is for other reasons...)

Well you would have to think to make the language. Everything in this world someone thought of. Even before language came people thought of stuff.

I would say that the egg came first. Years upon years of genetic mutations, in simple terms, caused the genetic strain that we now call chickens, and the first chicken was born from an egg. The real question is where do we define the line between the chicken and its ancestor? What was the first creature that could be called a chicken, and how similar is it to the chickens of today? Will there be a successor to the modern chicken? These are all interesting questions.

As for the thought vs. language question, obviously thought came first. The first, most basic thoughts: food, water, and shelter were in the minds of pre-humans long before we developed any sort of language.

For the second question, id have to say thought came first, with language coming in a close second when it became necessary to convey that thought. Though, considering the things some of the more immature members of the human race say nowadays, one could potentially argue that thought is not necessarily a requirement for language.









now, for the egg/chicken debate:




it seems its been well established already that the egg came first, but regarding SoL@R's comment about dinosaurs, I feel I should point out one thing you've ignored completely: the sheer size possessed by many of them.









imagine a sauropod: a lumbering, 65 ton, 200-foot-tall mountain of a creature. A cold-blooded, 2-chambered heart simply would not have been strong enough to carry hundreds of gallons of blood straight up almost 100 feet of neck to be able to supply oxygen to the brain. Your cold-blooded sauropod just died of oxygen deprivation and/or heart failure while the warm-blooded one with the 4-chambered heart sitting next to it is happily munching on trees









also, there is evidence that can be found in the skeletal system (without needing a microscope) that suggests not only were dinosaurs NOT reptiles, they were in fact more closely related to birds. Take the hip structure of a velociraptor for example, which is arranged so that its legs come out of the pelvis straight down (like the ones in modern birds), allowing it to stand tall and run quickly, as opposed to the arrangement found in modern reptiles, where the legs grow outward, making them crawl on their bellies most of the time. IMO, the name velociraptor (meaning basically, "quick bird of prey") was well chosen indeed. And this same hip structure is present in most species of dinosaurs, including sauropods (brontosaurus, brachiosaurus,...), theropods (t-rex and cousins), stegosaurus, triceratops, etc...






and lastly, and what I feel is the most compelling evidence, many fossils (like some from the aforementioned velociraptor) have been found to have fossilized feathers present as well. I don't know of any reptiles with feathers.

Well, here's what I think.

Thought came first. Or, maybe, thought and language happened simultaneously. There was a thought, and that thought was understood by the person who thought it. So perhaps it happened at the same time, or language very closely followed thought.

And maybe the chicken, or the ancestor of the chicken came first.
This debate on dinosaurs becoming chickens and birds got me thinking...With all this on Velociraptors, Tyrannosaurus Rex'es (Rexi? Rexen?), and the like. What if those were just ancient predatory birds, and never reptilian to begin with? So that way, it makes sense that the Sauropods, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and other dinosaurs existed too. Those were reptiles, and velociraptors and t-rexes were birds. It shouldn't be too far-fetched. Look at the "Terror Bird" that once roamed South America, or the toothed birds that have been fossilized. Or even the now-living Ostrich, or the Cassowary. Sure, there aren't any teeth, but they do have lots of the same qualities. And those probably didn't start with half-lizard half-birds. But simply birds the whole time.