Which came first, the chicken or the egg, and why do you think so??

Answer 1

Well, it's pretty certain that the egg came first because of the fact that eggs existed for hundreds of millions of years and chickens and other birds only about 60 million years. The creatures which evolved into the chicken evidently came from eggs, and so with the process of millions of years of genetic mutations which formed what we formally call the chicken, it must have been the egg that came first.
If you are religious, however, I do believe that the bible said that god created the Earth in seven days, including all life. In my opinion, this means that he created chickens which lay eggs and not just eggs which chickens hatched from.

Answer 2

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?". When used in reference to difficult problems, a chicken and egg problem is similar to a Catch 22 situation where something cannot happen until a second thing does, and the second thing cannot happen until the first does. For example, a person might have trouble finding a job without work experience, but to get work experience he/she must get a job.

The earliest reference to the dilemma is found in Plutarch's Moralia, in the books titled "Table Talk," in 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 as to suggest 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..."

Various answers have been formulated in response to the question, many of them humourous.

Answer 3

The chicken. If you think of all the animals out there that lay eggs, if you don't have an example of the original animal and note what egg it lays, how would you tell the difference between all the available eggs? The chicken would have had to have been there to lay the egg, so you could say 'aha, it's a chicken egg'.

Answer 4

To answer that eternal but obsolete question, you could consider the following:

Take a would-be taxonomist (WBT), who observes the existence of a vast variety of living organisms feeling the need for a system to classify all of them.
Homing in on the chicken and not deprived of the necessary gene technology, the WBT would notice soon enough that a considerable variety exists within the entity that WBT wants to classify as a “chicken” aka Gallus gallus L.
The variability of phenotypes, genotypes, geographic distribution, genetic drift, interbreeding, ongoing mutations and you name it variability makes it all increasingly complicated.
To make a long story short: defining a “chicken” is arbitrary and is only a scientific tool to define what others are talking about. If some ID-code would describe all variables that define a particular “species” to everyone’s agreement (say a comprehensive but arbitrarily defined DNA sequence and gene expression model), we could ask the question what came first, the parent non-chicken ancestor or its real-chicken descendant in the form of an embryo in an egg.
Considering the “non-chicken” parent is therefore NOT a chicken by such definition, the “real chicken” egg/embryo came first for the sake your dilemma but considering the bottom line purpose of organism classification it is really an obsolete question outside the scope of an equally artificial concept.

Answer 5

No one.

Evolution has showed us that species have been changing gradually from unicellular reproduction to the now modern sexual intercourse. There was a leap of reproduction at some time in prehistory, and I believe that if we catalog all species as separate from others we would be mistaken; ancient chickens appeared at some point in history (Don't ask me when), and then changed very slowly into the modern chicken we know.

It's a process of adaptation, it doesn't have anything to do with the fully grown chicken or with the egg. There the same thing, but the son/daughter will have new information that the parent didn't have when he/she was an egg.

Answer 6

The chicken. An egg do nothing but lay there and get eaten by a predator.

Answer 7

It would take a chicken to lay an egg so logic would dictate that the first living anythings were "winked" into existence then they procreated and began to have offspring

Answer 8

The egg, because how else would there be chickens?

Answer 9

Definitely the chicken

Answer 10

chicken



it lay eggs