what came first the chicken or the egg?

Answer 1

In nature, living things evolve through changes in their DNA. In an animal like a chicken, DNA from a male sperm cell and a female ovum meet and combine to form a zygote -- the first cell of a new baby chicken. This first cell divides innumerable times to form all of the cells of the complete animal. In any animal, every cell contains exactly the same DNA, and that DNA comes from the zygote.
Chickens evolved from non-chickens through small changes caused by the mixing of male and female DNA or by mutations to the DNA that produced the zygote. These changes and mutations only have an effect at the point where a new zygote is created. That is, two non-chickens mated and the DNA in their new zygote contained the mutation(s) that produced the first true chicken. That one zygote cell divided to produce the first true chicken.
Prior to that first true chicken zygote, there were only non-chickens. The zygote cell is the only place where DNA mutations could produce a new animal, and the zygote cell is housed in the chicken's egg. So, the egg must have come first.

Answer 2

OOOO I know this one! The answer is the egg for sure because the question didn't specify what kind of egg. Many would assume that it was the chicken or the chicken's egg. The dinosaur egg came first before the chicken ever existed. So the answer is: THE EGG!!! Yay for eggs.

Answer 3

A team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

Answer 4

Between "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" and "pulling one's self up by one's own bootstraps", I'm not sure which is the more prosaic and which the more poetic. Both are examples of self-referential dependency, indicators of feedback dynamics resisting system changes, and the hallmark of really hard problems. To solve, you need a little bit of imperfect chicken, a little bit of imperfect egg, or a boot with at least part of a person in it, and a whole heap of patience and resolve.

I think the latter is more poetic.

I'm not sure if anyone has ever demonstrated the possibility of actually pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, as opposed to half up, which is all I can manage. I can, however, visualize it being successful (the trick being to impart enough momentum from the pull that it lifts you onto your feet). I can also visualize it being futile, if one attempts, whilst on one's feet, to lift oneself off the ground by pulling on the bootstraps (always assuming that there are no pulleys involved, just straps connected to boots in which are feet)

Conversely, as regards chickens and eggs, this has always struck me as a question of semantics. We know we have chickens and eggs, so there is no resonance in this image with possible futility. We just speculate futilely on the defining characteristics of chickens and their eggs. If we believe that chickens evolved, we wonder whether an almost-but-not-quite-chicken could lay a genuine chicken egg, or must the first genuine chicken have hatched from an almost-but-not-quite-chicken-egg. Since the First Genuine Chicken would probably (I guess we'll never know for certain) have interbred with almost-but-not-quite-cockerels, she might very well have had hatch from her first egg (by some reasoning, the First Genuine Chicken Egg) something which was not a genuine chicken. This is neither straightforward nor useful. Accordingly, I prefer to adopt the alternative reasoning and maintain that, by my convention and inherent in my definition, an egg from which hatches a genuine chicken is a genuine chicken egg and therefore the First Genuine Chicken hatched from the First Genuine Chicken Egg, so the egg came first.

On the other hand, if you believe that chickens were created, the Creator could have created the first chicken(s) live or as eggs. Had I been the architect, I would have reasoned that creating them live would be consistent with the more straightforward approach to be adopted for viviparous animals, so the chicken would have come first. -- AlanAshtonJeanes

[Of course the truth is that there is no such things as genuine chicken, it's a classification humans made up. By the time we called them chickens, they were already "genuine" chickens, so the chicken came first. Find out who named the chicken, and you'll have your first chicken. Before that they were just birds, that evolved from other birds, and they had been hatching from eggs for eons while continuing to evolve.]

Exactly. The ChickenAndEggProblem simply boils down to CreationVsEvolution? - the chicken was first if Creationism applies, the egg was first if Evolutionism applies. It's therefore only still a problem if (like me) you believe in BothCreationAndEvolution?. But only if you believe in both creation of chickens and simultaneous evolution of non-chickens into chickens, which is an unusual position bordering on the perverse. Perhaps I'm perverse then :) Actually, that's a good point, so I probably fall into the EggFirst? camp then.

In either case, you either have an egg with a chicken in it, or a chicken with eggs in it. Darwin indicated that the most adaptive survive, and anyone can see that a chicken can flee from danger, whereas an egg cannot. Which strongly suggests, according to both Darwin and Creationists, the chicken came first. It may be that in the future, when everyone gets their chickens in a row that both will see the truth. :) -- DonaldNoyes

Which brings up several other questions:
did the first tree have rings in it?
where did the first pool of water form, and where did it and that upon which it rested come from?
if there was a big bang and movement was outward from it, will it unbang and if so, why? if not why not?
is there any such thing as a cause and effect? and can science or religion exist without either?
did Darwin have only one theory? (read his words carefully)
why do we ask questions, and why are there more of them than there are answers?
does an good argument and presentation prove anything? If so to whom

Answer 5

A chicken has to lay an egg, but there has to be egg for there to be a chicken, but if Noah put 2 animals on the ark and no eggs I guess that the chicken cam first but I'm still very confused so I'll stop typing.

Answer 6

The egg. Drrrrrrrrrr!

Answer 7

The Egg of course because eggs are served at breakfast whereas chicken is eaten for lunch or dinner.

Answer 8

of course the chicken existed first before laying eggs

Answer 9

The egg. Why? Because first there were egg laying reptiles who gradually mutated into chickens. easy isnt it?

Answer 10

In true Darwinian logic the egg must come first because the beast that laid it wasn't quite chicken, but laid a GM (genetically modified) version of its own species to create the beginning of new variant species called chicken.