Which came first..

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

A few friends were arguing about this statement and I had to jump in and put my 2 cents in, or off them both.

The phrase ” Which came first the chicken or the egg?” is not a puzzle to be solved, or some sort of temporal paradox that scientist are attempting to grapple with. It’s meant to describe an unsolvable situation. Like “Catch 22”, that sort of thing.

If it were a puzzle, it would be very easy to solve. If the phrase is as stated, “Which came first the chicken or the egg?”, then the solution is the egg. There were dinosaurs laying eggs long before chickens ever evolved.

If the phrase is really a shorter version of “Which came first the chicken or the chicken egg?” Then it’s just as easy to solve. A type of egg is referred to by what laid it, not what’s in it. If a chicken laid an egg with a disfigured chicken in it, it’s still a chicken egg. If a chicken laid an egg with a turtle in it, it would still be a chicken egg.

At some point in history, a bird that was not quite a chicken, laid an egg with a mutated offspring inside. That offspring is what we consider today to be a chicken. The egg would have been referred to by what laid it. But, a chicken hatched out of it. So the chicken came first.