Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Logic versus reason.

When I was growing up, there was an age-old question that showed up on some kid’s show like Sesame Street or The Electric Company, that posed a quandary asking if the chicken came first or the egg came first. As a child, it was a hard question to answer. But as an adult, the answer seems quite obvious. But doing a quick Google search, tells me quite the opposite. So I pose the question to you: which do you believe came first; the chicken, or the egg?

Now, obviously, in the grand timeline of evolution, amniotic eggs have been around for about 340 million years and chickens didn’t show up until about 58 thousand years ago. So it’s safe to say eggs came first. But this is really the smart-ass answer to the question, because we all know they’re talking really talking about chicken eggs and chickens specifically.

Which makes us then question the process of evolution itself. Assuming evolution is the very gradual process of micro-changes in an organism over time through gene mutation of some sort, then we have to assume that at some point there was an animal that was very similar to what we would label a chicken, but evolutionarily speaking, wasn’t quite a chicken yet. So these two non-chicken birds mated and laid a clutch of eggs. On the outside, all of these eggs probably looked the same. But inside at least one of them, was something that was just different enough from its parents to not be whatever they were. It was now a chicken.

This means that you have to decide the nature of evolution. Can something that is NOT a chicken, lay a chicken egg? To me, the answer is no. Only a chicken can lay a chicken egg. Only a robin can lay a robin egg, and only a turtle can lay a turtle egg. It is the animal doing the laying that determines what kind of egg it is. The creature that comes out of the egg, is largely irrelevant to what the egg itself is.

This means, the chicken came first.