Ever been stuck in one of those endless debates with your friends that just goes round and round? Well, there’s perhaps no greater head-scratcher than the classic “which came first: the chicken or the egg?” conundrum. It’s kept philosophers, scientists, and random people at parties arguing for literally thousands of years!
I’ve always found this question fascinating because it seems so simple yet so impossible to answer. But guess what? Science actually has some pretty definitive things to say about it! Let’s dive into this eggsellent mystery together (sorry not sorry for the pun).
The Ancient Roots of the Chicken-Egg Dilemma
This isn’t just some modern brain teaser. The chicken-egg question has serious philosophical history!
Plutarch posed this question way back in the 1st century CE in his essay “The Symposiacs” as a philosophical matter. Before him, Aristotle (that super smart Greek dude from the 4th century BCE) actually thought about this too and concluded it was an infinite sequence with no true starting point.
In the 5th century CE, a writer named Macrobius said that while the question might seem trivial, it “should be regarded as one of importance.” By the 16th century, many Christians considered the question settled based on Biblical creation stories – God created animals first, so obviously the chicken came before the egg.
But then along came the Enlightenment philosophers who were like “hold up, let’s think about this again.” The debate was back on!
The Scientific Perspective: Evolution Changes Everything
Modern evolutionary biology completely transformed how we approach this question The key insight? Species evolve gradually over time, which means chickens had ancestors that weren’t quite chickens. This is similar to what the Greek philosopher Anaximander thought when he pondered this paradox thousands of years ago
So what does science tell us? Well, it depends on what exactly you’re asking!
If We’re Talking About Eggs in General…
The egg definitely came first!
Hard-shelled eggs (technically called amniotic eggs) that could be laid on land first appeared around 312-340 million years ago. These were a total game-changer for vertebrates because they allowed animals to reproduce away from water.
These eggs had:
- Extra membranes (chorion, amnion, allantois)
- Built-in life support systems
- Stored nutrients
- Waste storage capabilities
- Protection from the environment
Chickens, on the other hand, only evolved around 8,000-10,000 years ago as domesticated descendants of red junglefowl. Some DNA analyses suggest the divergence might have happened around 58,000 years ago, but that’s still WAY more recent than the first eggs.
So if we’re asking about eggs in general – the egg predates chickens by hundreds of millions of years!
But What About Chicken Eggs Specifically?
This is where it gets a bit more complicated and interesting!
At some point, a bird that was almost-but-not-quite a chicken (let’s call it a proto-chicken) laid an egg. Due to genetic mutations in either the mother’s ovum, the father’s sperm, or the fertilized zygote itself, the animal that hatched from that egg had enough genetic differences to be considered the first “true” chicken.
So technically, the first chicken came from an egg that wasn’t quite a chicken egg (it was laid by a proto-chicken). Then that first chicken grew up and laid the first actual chicken egg.
By this logic, the chicken came before the chicken egg!
But wait – there’s another twist…
The Protein Plot Twist
Some researchers studying how chicken eggshells form discovered something interesting about a protein called ovocleidin-17 (OC-17).
This protein is found in chicken ovaries and helps with eggshell formation. It deposits calcium carbonate crystals to create the hard shell, and some scientists have suggested this means the chicken must have come before the chicken egg – since without OC-17, you can’t form a proper chicken eggshell.
HOWEVER (and this is a big however), similar proteins have been found in other birds like turkeys and finches. This suggests these eggshell-forming proteins are common to all birds and existed long before chickens evolved. So this protein argument doesn’t really settle the debate after all.
My Take: The Egg Wins (Mostly)
After looking at all the evidence, I’m firmly on Team Egg. Here’s why:
- Eggs as a concept existed for hundreds of millions of years before chickens
- The evolutionary process means some non-chicken bird laid an egg containing the first genetic chicken
- While the first “chicken egg” technically came from a chicken, the first chicken came from an egg
The way I see it, the egg wins on a technicality. But honestly, the whole question is kinda circular (like an egg, ha!). As the Australian Academy of Science puts it, it’s something of a “false dichotomy” – eggs came before chickens, but chicken eggs couldn’t exist without chickens.
Real-World Consequences of This Debate
Believe it or not, this seemingly silly question has had some serious consequences!
In July 2024, two men in Indonesia got into a heated debate over the chicken-egg question at a party where alcohol was involved. One man got so angry that he left, came back with a knife, and stabbed the other man 15 times, killing him! The reports don’t even mention which side of the debate the killer was on.
That’s a pretty extreme example of how philosophical debates can escalate, but it shows how passionate people can get about these seemingly simple questions.
Practical Applications of the Chicken-Egg Metaphor
Beyond the literal question, “chicken and egg” has become a useful metaphor for situations where:
- It’s unclear which event is the cause and which is the effect
- There seems to be an infinite regress problem
- Actions depend on other actions being completed first
We use this in discussions about:
- Technology development (need users to develop apps, but need apps to attract users)
- Economic growth (need jobs for spending, need spending for jobs)
- Skills development (need experience to get a job, need a job to get experience)
Fun Facts About Chickens and Eggs
While we’re on the topic, here are some cool things you might not know:
- Domestic chickens are incredibly efficient egg-layers, capable of producing a fresh egg roughly every 24 hours
- The red junglefowl, the closest ancestor to chickens, is native to southeastern Asian countries like India, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia
- Archaeological evidence suggests red junglefowl were first domesticated around 10,000 years ago
- The modern chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) may have some genes from grey junglefowl (Gallus sonneratii) too, showing some hybridization
- Chickens were domesticated multiple times independently in different parts of Asia
The Bottom Line
So there ya have it! The age-old chicken and egg question actually has a scientific answer, even if it’s a bit more complicated than a simple “chicken” or “egg” response.
I think what I love most about this question is how it shows the intersection of philosophy, biology, and everyday thinking. What seems like a simple riddle actually opens up fascinating discussions about evolution, causality, and how we understand origins.
Next time someone asks you this question at a party, you’ll have plenty to say! Just maybe avoid getting into a heated argument about it… we all know how that ended in Indonesia.
Disclaimer: While writing this article, I consumed approximately 3 eggs and zero chickens. My bias may or may not be influenced by this fact.
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Eggs come from chickens and chickens come from eggs: that’s the basis of this ancient riddle. But eggs – which are just female sex cells – evolved more than a billion years ago, whereas chickens have been around for just 10,000 years. So the riddle is easily solved…or is it?
Taken at face value, there is no doubt that the egg came before the chicken. We tend to think of eggs as the shelled orbs laid by birds from which their chicks hatch – unless we eat them first. But all sexually reproducing species make eggs (the specialised female sex cells). That’s 99.99 per cent of all eukaryotic life – meaning organisms that have cells with a nucleus, so all animals and plants, and everything but the simplest life forms.
We don’t know for sure when sex evolved but it could have been as much as 2 billion years ago, and certainly more than 1 billion. Even the specialised sort of eggs laid by birds, with their tough outer membrane, evolved more than 300 million years ago.
As for chickens, they came into being much later. They are domesticated animals, so evolved as the result of humans purposefully selecting the least aggressive wild birds and letting them breed. This seems to have happened in several places independently, starting around 10,000 years ago.
The wild ancestor of chickens is generally agreed to be a tropical bird still living in the forests of Southeast Asia called the red junglefowl – with other junglefowl species possibly adding to the genetic mix. From these origins, humans have carried chickens around the world over the past two millennia or more.
So, eggs dramatically predate chickens. But to be fair to the spirit of the riddle, we should also consider whether a chicken’s egg predates a chicken. As humans consistently chose the tamest red junglefowls and bred them together, the genetic makeup of the resulting birds will have shifted. At some stage during this domestication process the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) evolved into a new subspecies, Gallus gallus domesticus, AKA the chicken.
In practice, it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when this happened. But in theory, at some point two junglefowl bred and their offspring was genetically different enough from the species of its parents to be classified as a chicken. This chicken would have developed within a junglefowl egg and only produced the very first chicken’s egg on reaching maturity. Looked at this way, the chicken came first.
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Which Came First – The Chicken or the Egg?
FAQ
Did the chicken come first or the egg?
So, did the chicken come first, or the egg? According to the UNIGE team, it’s possible that the building blocks of female reproductive cells, or eggs, appeared long before chickens evolved. Nature, therefore, could have possessed the genetic tools to create eggs long before chickens came along.
Who came first – the egg or the egg?
The age-old circular reasoning stems from the idea that chickens hatch from eggs and eggs are laid by chickens. So who came first? After almost a century, the ancient riddle has finally been solved. The egg is the winner. Dozens of scientists across the world have verified this.
How did a bird become a chicken?
To answer it simply, one day there was a bird that wasn’t a chicken, and it laid an egg, and that egg hatched into a chicken. Basically, at some point, an almost-chicken creature produced an egg containing a bird whose genetic makeup (on account of thousands of accruals of small genetic mutations) was fully chicken. How do we know?
When did a chicken come first?
No one knows exactly when this happened, but it likely occurred around 10,000 years ago. So, if a chicken developed from a red junglefowl egg, then you could argue that the chicken came first and afterward produced the first chicken egg. So, What Came First?
Which egg comes first – a chicken or a bird?
That answer is also true— the egg comes first —when you narrow it down to chickens and the specific eggs from which they emerge. At some point, some almost-chicken creature produced an egg containing a bird whose genetic makeup, due to some small mutation, was fully chicken.
What does chicken and egg mean?
“Chicken-and-egg” is a metaphoric adjective describing situations where it is not clear which of two events should be considered the cause and which should be considered the effect, to express a scenario of infinite regress, or to express the difficulty of sequencing actions where each seems to depend on others being done first.
Is there an answer to the chicken or the egg?
If the question refers to eggs in general, the egg came first. The first amniote egg – that is, a hard-shelled egg that could be laid on land, rather than remaining in water like the eggs of fish or amphibians – appeared around 312 million years ago.
Did the chicken or the egg came first?
According to research, the amniotic eggs made their debut roughly 340 million years ago and the first chickens evolved around 58,000 years ago at the earliest, it’s reasonable to assert that the egg came first.
How to answer what came first, the chicken or the egg?
Assuming there is only one species of chicken, the first chicken to walk the Earth was born of an egg. That egg had to have been laid by an organism that has to be classified as a different species since it is not the first chicken. Therefore, the egg came before the chicken.
Did the chicken or the egg come first in the Bible?
The Biblical account of God creating birds tells us the chicken came before the egg. “Then God said, ‘Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.