Which came first?The hen or the egg?

Question

I'm confused...

Answer 1

well me and my third graders decided it is the egg...cos weneva we learn abt life cycles in science, it always start with the egg...

Answer 2

There are many different answers to this question, hence the fact that it is such a commonly asked one.
It is not a trick question.
In terms of evolution, the egg came first. A hen could not just 'appear', I'm sure everyone will agree. Something like a hen, layed the egg, which was a mutilated form of the species that layed it. This reproduced with another mutilated form of species and had lots of eggs, which then reproduced etc., and eventually we came to the hen, which even now is ever changing, just very slowly in our eyes, because our lifetimes are so short in comparison to evolution.
A religious answer is that a higher being created the species, in which case the hen OR the egg came first, whichever They created.
Another way of looking at it is that the hen existed in many complex genes which existed in a lot of animals, which then reproduced. This is a difficult one to explain, but belongs to a certain belief that everything that exists now has always existed, and evolved etc. from other things. A hen's genes are present in its biological parents, as are every beings. And thus the hen came first in this sense.
Hence the complication of this question, and the multiple choices of answer. I hope this helped in your quest of curiosity! There's no need to be confused if you can keep your thoughts clear.

Answer 3

first of all...its the chicken and the egg....

here's some scientific explanation:

It is a question that has vexed philosophers since the Greeks. But it seems we may now have the answer to the beguilingly simple question: "Which came first?" It's the egg.
This reassuring conclusion was the work of an expert panel including a philosopher, geneticist and chicken farmer.

"Whether chicken eggs preceded chickens hinges on the nature of chicken eggs," said panel member and philosopher of science David Papineau at King's College London.

"I would argue it's a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg. By this reasoning, the first chicken did indeed come from a chicken egg, even though that egg didn't come from chickens."

The oldest recorded reference to the childish conundrum goes back to a collection of essays and discussions by the Greek historian Mestrius Plutarchus, born in 46AD. In a section entitled Whether the Hen or the Egg Came First he suggested that the question was already well established: "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."

Plutarchus also hinted at the puzzle's greater significance: "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."

Whether the panel solved that debate is not clear, but they were unanimous on the correct chicken/egg pecking order. John Brookfield, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Nottingham said the solution involves piecing together the speciation event in which chickens first evolved.

He imagines two non-chicken parents getting together and giving rise to the first individual of a new species because of a genetic mutation. "The first chicken must have differed from its parents by some genetic change, perhaps a very subtle one, but one which caused this bird to be the first ever to fulfil our criteria for truly being a chicken," said Prof Brookfield.

"Thus the living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken that it would develop into, and thus would itself be a member of the species of chicken," he added.

Will the panel be conducting other chicken-related enquiries, such as why did the chicken cross the road? Prof Brokfield refused to comment.

Answer 4

depends you cant have an egg without a hen because then what would lay the egg. and you cant hen without an egg because then where would the hen hatch from.

a more scientific answer is that the t-rex has evolved into some feathered thing and then layed an egg that turned out to be a hen.

Answer 5

Definitely egg. Because during evolution the species that existed before the hen must have changed features of its offspring. It cannot just evolve into a hen directly. It is like a monkey cannot become a man. Its offsprings have to acquire the features of a man slowly.

Answer 6

This has been answered recently in journals. The eggs came from animals similar to chickens, and mutated into chickens



It also reminds me of a cartoon in the Houston Chronicle, where an egg is smoking a cigarette in bed, and the hen says, "Well I guess that answers that question".

Answer 7

Well, the best I can come up with is the hen, because in the Bible it says that God created all of the animals. (Of course it doesn't say that He didn't make an egg that hatched into a chicken, so I guess that doesn't really substantiate anything.)

Answer 8

Neither...

the hen cannot procreate alone
the chick from the resulting egg can't either...

This is an old old "trick" question meant to confuse.

Hen and Rooster came first...together.

Answer 9

According to evolution, the egg would have come first. The egg would have been of some distant ancestor of the chicken, and they embryo would be of our current chicken.

If you're with the creation theory, the chicken came first because God went 'poof' and all the animals just 'appeared'.

Answer 10

The egg. A bird lays an egg (not a chicken), it's a mutant. It has mutated. It isn't like the bird that laid it or a chicken. It breeds with a suitable bird and lays....... chicken eggs. They breed and we get more chickens and so on until they become flightless and domesticated.

That must be a top answer and worth 10 points....

Answer 11

i would say the egg, because as animals evolved eventually something that came out of an egg would be classified as a chicken