The chicken came before the egg

Pro begins by stating it "cannot be proven" that two non-chickens created the chicken. This is false. Evolution is accepted by virtually every scientist not inhibited by the confines of religion. Pro's profile states that he is an atheist thus I am assuming he accepts evolution as a verifiable and proven theory. As such, evolution states explicitly how a new species comes into fruition: two animals of different breeds mate [1]. Since we know that the 'chicken' is an evolved bird from the Jurassic era (Archaeopteryx), we know that it was subject to the same evolution as every other bird from this species [2] and thus was conceived through the process I have described: two creatures (not chickens) mating and the DNA resulting in the DNA that would now be evident in all future chickens. Pro's statement that non-chickens do not lay chicken eggs is misguided. While it's true that non-chickens cannot lay chicken eggs, it is true that non-chickens laid the FIRST chicken egg and that's how chickens came into existence in the first place. Pro asked at what point a dinosaur stopped being a dinosaur and started being a chicken. Well, paleontologists agree that the evidence proving birds evolved from small predatory dinosaurs in Mesozoic times is overwhelming [3]. Birds evolving from dinosaurs developed through the Cenozoic era and most of the bird relatives we know today had appeared by the Oligocene period (35+ million years ago). In fact, the dinosaur-to-bird lineage can better be divided according to non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs. The evidence for this is blatant. Pro absolutely cannot deny or refute this reality unless he seeks to disprove evolution entirely (which would be absurd considering he admits that he believes in evolution... apparently he just does not understand it). Pro mistakenly asserts, "By your definition, a chicken is never a chicken or all its ancestors are chickens too." This is a straw man; I have never stated any such thing. Nowhere did I say a chicken is never a chicken. A chicken is quite obviously a chicken. Moreover I never said that all of a chicken's ancestors are chickens. In fact I said the exact opposite. A chicken's ancestors like our ancestors do not being to our species. A species is created by two members of different species interbreeding. As such, the DNA found in a chicken is specific to that of chickens based on the result of DNA from 2 non-chickens mating. Finally Pro asks me to define chicken and then presents a dictionary definition. That's fine and I agree to that definition. However this debate has nothing to do with how a chicken is defined and instead focuses on which came first: the chicken or the egg. I have explained why a chicken egg HAD to come first. Pro has not explained in any way whatsoever how a chicken could have magically appeared without first coming from an egg. If Pro agrees that chickens are hatched from eggs, which is inherent to the concept of chicken [4] then he must accept the reality that a chicken's DNA is present in the very first zygote that a chicken develops from. Ergo, a chicken had to be a chicken while it was still inside of the egg. Pro -- How can a chicken have come into existence without being a chicken while it was still inside the egg? That fundamental question imperative to Pro's case has been left entirely unanswered. Conclusion... "Consistent with evolutionary change, the genetic mutations resulting in the present-day chicken seems to have occurred over millions of years. On occasion the mistakes, changes, or mutations that occur in the evolutionary process produce a creature that is not the same as the parents and others of its former species... Prior to the arrival of the chicken, a pre-chicken creature that was at least one generation away from our present-day chicken, laid an egg that contained an embryo with DNA consistent with the 'new' aviary creature known as chicken. Therefore, the egg that contained the newly evolved chicken preceded its hatching. In other words, prior to the arrival of the first zygotic mix of male and female pre-chicken DNA that combined or mutated to form today's chicken, there were only non-chickens. The DNA mutations occurred at the cellular level in the zygote developing inside the egg. Therefore, the egg clearly preceded the chicken" [3]. [1] http://evolution.berkeley.edu... [2] http://sci.waikato.ac.nz... [3] http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org... [4] http://www.afn.org...