What came first...?

Question

...the chicken or the egg?

Answer 1

I'm thinking it was the chicken. If the egg came first, there would be no chicken (mother hen) to feed it during it's beginning part of life. Plus, without getting religious crazy, God created Adam and Eve (or the first male & female, however you look at it) as adults capable of reproduction. Since God also created animals somehow, they were also probably first made as adults.
Yeah, that's a head scratcher for sure!

Answer 2

It does not really matter because the chicken is within the egg. Therefore they are an entity that is one.

There you go, problem dissolved.


Actually, more than likely the chicken egg was born from species that were like chickens but not totally chickens because the animals were still evolving.

Therefore, the chicken egg came from a not fully evolved chicken. So, the chicken egg came first.

Answer 3

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.

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.

Answer 4

The chicken came first.

God made the Adam and Eve and the animals. So the chicken came first.

Answer 5

The farmer - he had to find the chicken or the egg right?

Answer 6

The chicken.. 24> And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. ..therefore God didnt create any eggs on earth in which to become chickens.

Answer 7

neither, it was either 2 chickens (a hen and a rooster) or 2 eggs

Answer 8

Egg.

There were dinosaur and lizard eggs before chickens were ever hatched.

Answer 9

Egg.

Answer 10

God created the chicken on the fifth day.