"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

Has this already been discussed? What I wanted to know.. how is this question approachable without defining the egg first? A friend of mine wanted to make a bet with me. He said the chicken came first and wanted to bet me $100 that he could "prove" this. For some reason, at that moment, I was pretty sure that the answer was the egg. But I still didn't want to bet. Then it hit me that we could both probably win.. depending on the definition of the egg though.

If you just say egg, then the egg came first. But if you say chicken egg, then the chicken came first. Is this statement correct?

I didn't take the bet because maybe this fool found the real answer somewhere and I just didn't see it. I looked online, on a few different sites, and the answers you find are complicated and there are many. So, has this ever been broken down and solved logically?

Thanks in advance


(I'm still leaning towards egg came first)

Hopefully lock/ban comes next.

So helpful.

Imagine a chain of chickens going back in time: you take one chicken from today, then her mother, then her mother, and so on indefinitely. If you keep following this line back through the millenia you'll eventually encounter beings that you wouldn't classify as chickens. But the exact point will be up to you. There's no way (besides arbitrarily) to decide exactly where to stop along this chain and say "This is the first chicken. She is of a different species than her mother."

That didn't help much. What am I supposed to get from your example?

There was no first chicken.

An egg didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere. The chicken evolved over x ammount of years, from probably a single celled organism.

That's not the question though. There was no first planet and there was no first human, but that doesn't mean we don't know that planets came before humans.

I'm not saying the question isn't terrible, cause it is.

It may be an arbitrary distinction, but there was a first chicken... and that being was hatched from an egg.

Not that it makes much difference, but sometimes in discussing this issue people seem to forget that chickens are domesticated, and so in fact this process is not something that happened over millions of years. It happened during the reign of humans.

So in your opinion the egg came first, right? I guess a better question might be "did the first chicken come from a chicken egg?"

Let's look at it this way..
OK. We have two animals, animal A and animal B. Animal A is to become animal B at some point in the future. Animal A lays an egg and out comes animal B. Did Animal A lay an animal B egg or did animal A lay an animal A egg that produced animal B? In the latter case it was animal B that laid the first animal B egg.

You know what? It's giving me a headache just thinking about it. Clearly no one has ever tried to reason this out or it's just a paradoxical [circular] question.

eggs in general, or chicken eggs in specific? Because eggs came FAR before chickens.

That was my point earlier. I guess once you say chicken egg that would end that argument right there. Or would it? Ok, let's say chicken egg. Which is it then?

asking 'what came first' is pointless.

You can't tell which point on a perfect circle it was initially drawn from.

Would you at least draw me a chicken then?

LOL, why is a shilltard in the science forums?

Cause he's not a shilltard you nerdy manboy!

I'm leaning towards chicken [now] because only a chicken could've hatched the first chicken egg. What hatched that chicken then? A retired race pigeon ldo!

Case solved.

incase you didnt understand the circle analogy there was an infinite number of chickens and eggs, or rather 'causes' and 'products'

The first chicken was conceived by a pair of its biological relatives. It existed as an egg before it hatched to become a chicken.

I kinda understood what you were getting at, but it doesn't help solve the problem. It only makes it appear worse than it already is. Of course there had to be a first chicken or a first chicken egg.

And atm, glad I didn't bet my friend, I'm thinking it was the chicken who came first (regardless of how irrelevant or stupid that sounds). A chicken came from some other animal that was like it. Then that chicken gave birth to the first "pure breed" chicken egg/chicken.

The bacterium.

The rest is history.

No.

Speciation deviation develops through mutation which occurs during gestation.

Therefore the chicken as we know it developed in the egg.

Why are people taking this dude's posts seriously? He couldn't be more obvious in his trolling if he posted "Science lulz" after every sentence.

I was being serious. Just because it's a ridiculous type of question does not mean I'm not serious. For money I get serious. It's not serious money but it could've been easy money. Now I see why he made the bet. He was just hoping I'd believe his point of view over mine. I already talked to him and he said basically what nuclear500 said. Only thing is that that's not a solid answer to the question. If it is, I'd win (it's the egg). But it doesn't answer the question in fact with facts.

There isn't an answer. Just conclusions about different scenarios. You could even say that they both happened at the same time

"it's chickens all the way down!"