Question 1. Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Question 2. Why did the chicken cross the road?

In this special two-part episode of A Kimbo, I'll be answering both questions.

The answers are more clear than you thought.

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of A Kimbo.

OK, which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Before we can talk about chickens and eggs, we need to talk a little bit about how we all got here.

It begins with this. Creatures have sex. All creatures, all the ones we can see anyway, reproduce,

and that leads to lots of little creatures, usually way more creatures than will actually grow up.

Those babies, those babies, they look a lot like their parents, but not exactly like their parents, simply a lot like them.

So what it means is that traits are inherited. You don't have to know anything at all about genetics to know this just by looking at puppies or kittens or little baby calves.

So these babies, some of them, have traits that are lucky enough to fit in with the world around them and help them survive long enough so that they can have babies passing on those traits.

And generation after generation, that's what happens. Creatures have babies who look like them, but not exactly.

And those traits, the traits that work get passed on to grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Over time, the creatures start looking a little different. They start adapting apparently to the environment.

Now the wording here matters because they're not actually adapting. What's happening is the ones who are left are the ones who fit in.

So this actually can happen right before our eyes, certainly over a lifetime, but maybe over a week or two.

Consider the famous example of moths in Britain. There are lots of moths in Britain and most of them were shade of white.

When two white moths have little baby moths, those moths range from bright white to a little bit gray.

Well, this worked great for millennia until they started using coal to power things in the United Kingdom.

That coal, of course, puts soot all over everything. And the cliffs went from white to dark gray.

And over time, what would happen is moths that were born white got eaten by the birds that eat moths.

...