- Position‹2 of 3›
- The egg came first, and then it hatched a chicken
- Argument
There is scientific proof that the egg came first
The chicken is descended from other types of birds, and there is scientific proof to show that the first egg was laid by another bird, which eventually produced what we now know as a chicken.
The argument
The answer proponents give follows from taking the question literally and applying evolutionary theory to it. At a point in the evolution of birds, an almost chicken-like creature experienced a genetic or evolutionary mutation and managed to produce the world's first egg that hatched a bird that was, by modern standards, a chicken. This follows the Darwinist theory of evolution that most biologists have accepted to be true, so the claim is presented not as a trick for escaping a paradox but as an application of an accepted account of how species arise. The general mechanism does the work. The way most modern species have developed, and the way we have acquired our specific genetic traits as a species, is through slight genetic mutations that over time have accumulated into the creation of a new type of species. In the same way, the modern chicken developed from slight genetic mutations that added up to evolution. There was therefore no moment at which a non-chicken deliberately produced a chicken; there was a long sequence of small changes, and somewhere in that sequence a threshold was crossed. The decisive step concerns where the final change was located. This must mean that the egg came first, because the final mutation that put in place the modern chicken was not a mutation in the hen herself, it was simply a mutation in the genetic traits that were passed down. A parent's own body is not altered by the variation it transmits, so the near-chicken remained a near-chicken even as it produced something new. The first independent organism to carry that trait would therefore have to be the egg that hatched the chicken. On this reading the question has a determinate answer rather than a circular one: the egg came first, and then it hatched a chicken.
Premises
Counter-arguments
If the Darwinist theory is true, then the first chicken must have only existed once the chicken was hatched. When a chicken is still within its egg, it could technically be counted as a fetus or an embryo, not as an actual chicken. If the first chicken came to be with the birth of the genetically mutated bird, then that chicken was only born after it was hatched from its egg. Therefore, the starting point would originate at the first chicken, making the chicken come before the egg.