The Chicken and the Egg...

So which came first...?

There are two schools of thought on this...The first is the Aristotlilian thinking that says "A chicken is an actual chicken, but an egg is a potential chicken. Since actuality must preceed potentiality, the chicken must have come first."

I really like the simplicity of this argument...but there was a news item today that made me change my mind.

Genetisists and philosophers today agree that the egg came first. Their reason is that genetic material doesn't change over one's lifetime...as such, the first chicken had to have come from a chicken egg. A proto-chicken, due to mutations, can lay an chicken egg, but a proto-chicken egg (or any other kind of egg, for that matter) cannot grow up to be a chicken.

I don't really know why I found that interesting...but my question is....why in the hell are genetisists working on this and not for cures to cancer and Alzheimer's???