h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

if you're a evolutionalist its the egg that came first if your recligous chicken came first

Why would a religious person not believe the theory of evolution? Everybody I know does, and many of them are religious. Evolution is fully supported by all the major religions in the world, including Christianity and Islam.

kipperonthefloor is correct. Every religion and every religious reform generates a population of 'old believers who do not accept the change.

Gnomon is correct. That is to say, I vote for him.

I'm intrigued!... Why is it that if you are religious (I understand you mean theist) chicken came first? Could your god not have created the primordial egg from which the first chicken hatched?

The thrust of atheist argument these days is not against the majority of religious people but particularly against fundamentalists.

These are followers of a movement in the early twentieth century which published a series of books opposing the dilution of Christianity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals

Fundamentalists are the most vocal of Christians but that does not make them representative of all or even most.

Anyway to me the chicken/egg question is a non-starter, since genetically the chicken and its egg are identical.

Just for the sake of being completely off-the-wall, an exciting new discovery in paleontology. The Tyranosaurus Rex in its juvenile phase was feathered and did not turn into a scaly monster until it passed puberty. Apparently, birds are a neotenous form of dinosaur.

http://www.natureandscience.org/dinosunearthed/fast_facts.asp

I'm a bit suspicious of that, because there's no evidence that Tyrannosaurus was scaly, is there? All we have is its skeleton. I've thought that Tyrannosaurs were covered in feathers for years.

I have seen sections of fossilized skin that was purported to be from T-Rex and was scaly.

Of course, many modern birds have scaly skin in some areas, especially, though not always, on the legs.

A scaly skin for T-Rex as an adult does make good thermodynamic sense, since it would allow the animal to shed heat more readily on the chase.

The cube-square law working as it does, only the juveniles would have been very prone to hypothermia and the cooling requirements of the adult were analogous to those of modern elephants.

Even at that, I would be surprised if the adult didn't retain at least a little feather for display purposes.

Thinking of a T Rex wearing a little feather