In the history of chickens, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Question

im just curious...could somebody explain this to me?

Answer 1

Creation Theory.  The chicken.  God created the chicken, then said be fruitful and multiply.  

24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature according to its kind: cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth, each according to its kind”; and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all[b] the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Answer 2

If the egg came first, who sat on it to make it hatch?  

So I think it must have been the chicken.  And the rooster.

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Answer 3

the chicken came first...duh!

Answer 4

The chicken,

Birds evolved from the dinosaurs ,this can be most clearly seen when you look at bone joints in their legs.Also the fact that they lay eggs links them to dinosaurs as well.

Answer 5

The egg. Creatures were laying eggs long before there were any chickens.

Answer 6

theory of evoloution

at the point of mutation of which ever creature the chicken was before it was a chicken laid the EGG, the EGG the would have crossed the line between some chicken-look-alike-creature and chicken

this is because mutation occurs during the reproduction of a certain species

and that kinda explains why all evolutions are really just mutations thats turned out to be useful or attractive

so thats why i think the egg came first

Answer 7

i think the dinosaurs evolved into chickens and they laid eggs.

Answer 8

In the history of eggs, which came first?

The chicken or the egg is a reference to the causality dilemma which arises from the expression "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Since the chicken emerges from an egg, and the egg is laid by a chicken, it is ambiguous which originally gave rise to the other. To ancient philosophers, the question about the first chicken or egg also evoked the questions of how life and the universe began.[1] Cultural references to the chicken and egg intend to point out the futility of identifying the first case of circular cause and consequence.

History of the problem

Very early references to the dilemma are found in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed:

"If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother -- which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg." The same he held good for all species, believing, with Plato, that everything before it appeared on earth had first its being in spirit."[2]

Plutarch (46-126 AD) referred to a hen rather than simply a bird. His is Moralia in the books titled "Table Talk" discussed a series of arguments based on questions posed in a symposium. Under the section entitled, "Whether the hen or the egg came first," the discussion is introduced in such a way suggesting that the origin of the dilemma was even older:

"...the problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world..."[3]

A modern analysis covering all of the major variants was authored by Christopher Langan, published in 2001 at the Mega Foundation website,[4] and subsequently included in his book of essays, The Art of Knowing.[5] It appeared again in The Improper Hamptonian,[6], was included in abbreviated form in a 2001 Long Island Newsday Q&A column featuring Langan[7] and was compactly summarized in Langan's 2001 Popular Science interview.[8]

Responses to the dilemma

Definitions

In this case, the egg is assumed to be a chicken's egg. This is an obvious assumption since the question itself implies a link between the two.

If one assumes the egg to be a chicken egg then one must define what a chicken egg is:

If: A chicken egg will hatch a chicken

Then a bypass is allowed: An animal that was not a chicken laid the chicken egg which contained the first chicken. In this case the egg came first.

If: A chicken egg is the egg that only a chicken lays

Then a bypass is allowed: A chicken (that hatched from a non-chicken egg) laid an egg (a chicken egg).

If: A chicken egg will hatch a chicken and was laid by a chicken

Then there may be an error of definition. If the definition of "chicken" used does not refer to "chicken eggs," then the chicken must come first, because without chickens there cannot be any chicken eggs.

If: The question didn't specify that the egg had to be a chicken egg

Then we could easily say that the egg came first, because fish had been laying eggs long before chickens were around.

Theology

The Judeo-Christian story of creation literally says God created birds, not eggs. However, a theistic evolution standpoint says that chicken eggs are how God created chickens. Creation of birds (and other life forms) by God through superhuman beings is stated in Purāṇas and Dharmaśāstras.

Evolution

As species change over time, in the process of evolution, the first modern chicken was the offspring of the last direct ancestor of domestic chickens to not share that classification (likely the Red Junglefowl). Therefore, a non-chicken did, in fact, lay the first egg.[13]

However, the problem may not even be relevant from this perspective, as evolution is a slow and gradual process. The birds and their eggs evolved from an ancestor species into the species we have today over millennia, a time frame that vastly obscures the reproductive cycle between chicken and egg. At no point was a "chicken egg" created from a distinct "non-chicken" species.

This lack of distinction characterizes the blurry boundaries scientists erect between species and sub-species, whose differences are only apparent when referencing mutually isolated points along the time line (or between concurrently diverging species of a common ancestor) that show significantly dissimilar genetic information. Tiny genetic perturbations are being made each generation, and it should be clarified that these differences are between the generations themselves; the egg and the chicken it becomes are identical. Therefore, one may say for semantical purposes that the egg possesses the new genetic information before the chicken, simply because the egg precedes the chicken. But again, what makes this egg the first "chicken-to-be", and not its parents?

What was referred to as a chicken two thousand years ago is not exactly what a chicken is today, and the human classification of a species must evolve with the species until it becomes necessary to begin a new classification. If a specific generation possesses the genetic signature of what humans would technically classify as a chicken for the first time, then the egg has come first. However, this would be a vain effort, as the requirements would be arbitrary, and would be no different than declaring the next generation of domestic chicken the beginnings of a new species.

The nature of species classification is inherently macroscopic in time and is not compatible with the distinction between an organism and its offspring. The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is ill defined, with no logical answer.

One could leapfrog from chicken all the way back to the beginnings of life in search of an origin, but eventually what constitutes an egg becomes unclear, as life originally reproduced through metabolic division. Whatever the case, the classical question becomes complicated, and serves to show that such a narrow, black-and-white attitude is not useful in philosophical analysis of life.

Essentially, all organisms began evolution as microscopic egg-shaped creatures whose descendants evolved into multitudes of complex species. Therefore the short answer is the egg came before everybody, generating eggs and sperm who combined and evolved with each generation into a more complex creature.

Syntax

One can consider the question inside the framework of experience, making the question concrete instead of abstract: "The chicken or the egg - which came first?" "The chicken" came first - in the sentence of the question. If the question is phrased differently, the answer is different.

Cyclical response

One can also argue that neither came first, since the chicken is the egg and the egg is the chicken. Paradoxically this argument also proves that indeed both came first.



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Answer 9

The egg, laid by an 'almost' chicken.

Answer 10

One question to all the brilliant folks talking about the egg being first - if so, what laid it?

Answer 11

egg

Answer 12

The egg came first!

All hail the the Egg!

Answer 13

i've been waiting for this....

we can't really answer that.

Answer 14

evolution theory bro...

its the chick!!!

Answer 15

i would say the rooster came first (the draft)

then god made the chicken once he'd gotten the kinks out.

then they made an egg

thats my evulutionary theroy.