Transcript
Hello, friends!
An age-old question that is often asked as a riddle:
Which came first? Chicken or egg?
If you say chicken, the question arises
which egg did the first chicken hatch from?
And if you say egg, the question arises
which chicken laid the first egg?
And perhaps, the most controversial question about eggs is
whether eggs are vegetarian or non-vegetarian?
Let's answer these questions in this video.
This video is the third part of my evolution series.
The two videos I have made on evolution before this,
are linked in the description.
You can watch them later.
Come, let me teach you
the mystery of eggs.
What is the mystery of an egg?
About 150 million years ago,
when the earth was ruled by dinosaurs.
Small dinosaurs, big dinosaurs,
dinosaurs that ran, dinosaurs that flew.
This was the time when due to evolution,
some dinosaurs started getting smaller
and birds started evolving.
The first birds evolved around this time.
And as I told you in the earlier videos,
evolution doesn't happen in a linear direction.
It can happen in any direction, wherever it fits.
So, some dinosaurs evolved into scarier dinosaurs like T-Rex
and some dinosaurs got smaller and evolved into birds.
This is why it is said that
the common chicken today and the dinosaur T-Rex
had a common ancestor.
In fact, the T-Rex's closest living relatives
are present-day chickens and ostriches.
Look at an ostrich closely some time
they give off a lot of dinosaur vibes because of this.
And all dinosaurs used to lay eggs like these ostriches and chickens.
In fact, even before the birds evolved,
dinosaurs used to lay eggs.
Among animals, the art of laying eggs is ancient.
375 million years ago,
when this animal named Tiktaalik Roseae,
came out of the water and started living on land,
it laid eggs too.
But the eggs laid by it
did not look like the chicken eggs today.
Here, you need to imagine the eggs laid by fish.
They do not have an outer shell.
This animal must have laid some similar eggs.
So if we talk about chicken eggs and such,
which have a hard outer membrane, a shell,
their evolution took place around 300 million years ago.
And if we compare these eggs with a chicken,
then the evolution of chicken
took place only 3,500 years ago.
You heard it right,
around 1500 BC.
In Southeast Asia, people started farming
rice and millet.
A large quantity of grains were grown,
which attracted a wild animal living in the nearby jungle.
This animal was a wild red jungle fowl,
which looks like this,
very similar to a chicken.
But the difference is that it lived in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
When humans started farming,
it started living near the farms
because of the grains.
And around this time,
humans started domesticating it.
Because of this domestication,
it evolved through thousands of years,
and it evolved into today's chicken.
This species of jungle fowl is still alive.
You can still find it in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
But if you compare it to a common chicken,
you can see some differences.
The scientific name for this jungle fowl species
is Gallus Gallus.
And the scientific name for a common chicken is
Gallus Gallus Domesticus.
So one thing is clear here
that eggs are 300 million years old
and chicken is 3,500 years old.
So eggs evolved much earlier than chicken.
But you will say that the 300 million years old eggs were not laid by a chicken.
So the next question here is,
did chicken come first or chicken's eggs?
If you want to guess the answer to this question,
you can pause the video and write it in the comments.
It is not so difficult to get to the answer
if you understand the stages of evolution.
It's very simple.
Chicken evolved from wild red jungle fowl.
This wild red jungle fowl must have evolved from another animal.
Let's call that animal a proto-chicken.
The ancestors of the chicken.
So, there must have been a point in time
when two proto-chickens mated.
During reproduction, there must have been genetic mutations.
And due to this,
an egg was formed
from which the first true red jungle fowl was born.
And in the same way, the first chicken must have been born too.
The combination of two proto-chickens' DNA
created the first true chicken DNA.
This evolution process occurs only during reproduction.
It is only after this that
the true chicken would have laid more eggs
giving birth to more chickens.
So the answer to this question is very clear.
The egg came first.
And this egg was not laid by a chicken.
But it was given by an ancestor species of a chicken, which was almost like a chicken.
When can an animal species be called a chicken
and when should it not be called a chicken?
There is a big grey area here.
This line that has been drawn,
it has been drawn by humans.
The real differences,
must have emerged after many generations.
What are the forces of evolution
that make evolution possible?
I talked about this in the first part of the evolution series.
If you haven't watched this video, the link is in the description.
So, overall, I want to say that
it's not like there was a day in history
when the first chicken was born.
As if, on 3rd December 1500 BC,
two jungle fowls mated and laid an egg
and that egg contained the first chicken.
Evolution is not like that.
This process is gradual, stage by stage, generation by generation.
Later in the video, when I will tell you about artificial selection,
you will understand better.
Before that, let's know
whether an egg is vegetarian or non-vegetarian.
Some people will say that the answer is obvious.
Eggs contain life.
A baby hatches from the egg.
So, obviously, the egg is non-vegetarian.
But the thing is, friends,
eggs are of two types.
Haploid eggs are the unfertilized eggs
which contain only the female sex cells.
These eggs can never produce a baby.
The other type is Diploid eggs,
which are produced after mating.
Here, male cells fertilize female sex cells
and babies hatch from these eggs.
And we often associate this process of fertilization with reproduction.
But do you know that
there are many plants many plants and animal species
that can reproduce without fertilization too?
This is called Parthenogenesis
and in these cases,
even an unfertilized egg
can give birth to a new life.
It can become a new baby.
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Now, let's get back to the topic.
We get to see this in plant species like
pineapple and banana plants.
And among animals in, lizards, zebra sharks,
and rattlesnakes,
we can see this parthenogenesis.
This word comes from the words Parthenos + Genesis,
which means Virgin + Creation.
A Virgin Creation taking place.
Without sperm, an unfertilized egg
is developing into an embryo.
So the question here is,
can we see parthenogenesis in chickens?
The straight answer to this is no.
An unfertilized chicken egg
cannot give become a chick.
And most of the eggs we eat
are unfertilized.
Some of you may be thinking,
that you saw a blood spot while eating an egg.
You might assume that that egg was fertilized.
But there is no need to worry about that either.
Because that's not true.
When a hen lays eggs,
some small blood vessels near the ovaries
sometimes burst and rupture.
So the drops of blood are from there.
Those of you who regularly eat eggs
must have noticed these blood spots.
But now you don't have to worry that
a chick might hatch from the egg.
So back to our question, you must have understood that
eggs can be vegetarian or non-vegetarian.
But most of the eggs that we eat
are unfertilized, so they are vegetarian.
Because these eggs neither have any meat
nor can a life emerge from them.
These eggs can be compared to milk.
Mahatma Gandhi said the same thing.
Those who drink milk
should not have any problem with these sterile, unfertilized eggs.
And the same point was reiterated by the Supreme Court in 2004.
The court was hearing a matter
about whether eggs should be allowed to be sold in religious places like Rishikesh or not.
Supreme Court held that
eggs are vegetarian.
Overall, eggs are a highly nutritious food.
It has a lot of protein.
Vitamin B12, B2, B5,
Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Selenium,
Calcium, Iron, Potassium, Zinc,
Manganese, Vitamin E, Antioxidants.
It's full of a lot of nutrients.
This is why the Indian government used to run ads
to encourage people to eat eggs daily.
This was a good food source to fight malnutrition.
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Now, some eggs are brown and some are white.
And people think that brown eggs are healthier than white eggs
because brown bread is healthier than white bread.
But actually, this is not the case with eggs.
The difference between white and brown
is due to the breed of the chicken.
The breed of the chicken laying the egg.
And nutritionally, both brown and white eggs
are very similar to each other.
Another interesting thing to know here is that
today, chickens lay around 200-300 eggs in a year.
But their ancestors, the Red Jungle Fowl,
only laid around 10-15 eggs in a year.
How did this happen?
What was the force of evolution
that made chickens evolve in a way that
they lay more eggs?
The answer is, friends,
here, natural selection played no role at all.
Here, evolution occured
due to artificial selection.
Due to human interference.
Humans practised selective breeding of chickens.
Thousands of years ago, a person might have noticed
a chicken laying more eggs.
Selectively, that chicken was bred
to have an offspring that laid even more eggs.
It was done to the next generation too.
This kept on repeating again and again.
Artificial selection was carried out by humans
which led to the present-day situation where
a chicken lays 200-300 eggs a year.
Many people will find this human intervention unnatural.
But humans do this artificial selection
in cows and buffaloes as well.
The cow that gives more milk
is artificially bred by farmers.
Or some other hereditary traits
that are more beneficial to farmers
are selectively bred
so that it is more prominent in future generations.
Now, hearing this, the vegans would say,
that this is a reason why we should not consume milk.
Because humans keep interfering everywhere.
Humans have bred these animals for their own benefit.
But the thing is, friends,
humans have not only bred animals like this
but have also bred trees and plants by artificial selection.
Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage
all these vegetables have evolved from wild mustard plants
after thousands of years of artificial selection.
Had you eaten a banana from a banana plant 7,000 years ago
firstly, it would've been smaller.
Secondly, once you peeled the banana to eat it
you would have seen many black seeds in it.
There were so many seeds in a banana
that it would've been difficult to eat it.
Like a present-day pomegranate.
In this photo, you can see,
what bananas looked like back then.
When humans started the artificial breeding of bananas,
they chose the fruits
with fewer seeds.
After repeatedly choosing it,
these seeds have now gone extinct after thousands of years.
And we can eat these big yellow bananas
which have no seeds.
If you think about it,
artificial breeding must have been natural initially.
If you see an apple tree,
and you see an apple that is the biggest,
reddest and juiciest of all,
and you get a chance to grow an apple tree in your garden,
obviously, you will choose the seed of the fruit to grow the new tree
the fruit which was the biggest, juiciest, and reddest.
On the other hand, some people argue that
this entire thing is unnatural.
Since humans started farming,
agriculture was unnatural in itself.
12,000 years ago,
the time when agriculture began.
Before that, humans lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Living in the jungle,
killing small animals,
or eating fruits from trees.
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari states that
10,000 years ago wheat was merely a wild grass
which was found in some regions of the Middle East.
But in the last few thousand years,
wheat has spread so much all across the world that
now, wheat occupies 2.25 million square kilometres of the earth's surface.
Homo Erectus, who were the ancestors of humans,
I had mentioned them in my second video on evolution.
They were living comfortably for 2 million years
without farming.
And when the domestication of wheat began around 8000 BC,
Homo Sapiens were also living comfortably for 200,000 years without farming.
But because of wheat,
we cut down trees, started farming,
and we made clear fields
because wheat didn't like stones and rocky area.
We removed different weed plants from the fields
because wheat did not like them.
We brought buckets full of water from the rivers to irrigate the fields
because wheat needed a lot of water to grow.
We used new techniques to drive away insects and pests
because wheat did not like insects and pests.
Natural insecticides were first used about 4,500 years ago
by the Sumerians,
who used sulfur compounds to drive away insects and pests
during farming.
Yuval Noah Harari says in his book that
when humans started domesticating wheat
it was wheat that domesticated humans
because humans changed their lives to farm.
Now another question arises here.
What is natural and what is unnatural?
What is good for the earth, good for nature
and what is not?
Should you be a vegetarian or a vegan
or a non-vegetarian?
This is a question that can be made into a separate video.
So I would like to end today's video here
and I would like you to think about it yourself.
Form your opinion on this question
based on what I have told you so far
before I explain it to you in a new video.
If you liked this video,
then the history of human ancestors and the entire story of the evolution of homo sapiens
can be understood in this video by clicking here.
It has been explained in great detail.
Thank you very much.
And don't forget to register on the link given in the description
to become a stem cell donor.
It is a completely free process.
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