What Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

If "egg" means any egg rather than only a chicken egg, then eggs long predate chickens. The article cites fish about 500 million years ago versus birds about 150 million years ago, with chicken domestication only 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.

• Why it matters: The famous riddle collapses once the word egg is defined precisely.
• By the numbers: Eggs outdate birds by hundreds of millions of years in the cited timeline.
• How it works: Egg-laying animals existed long before junglefowl became domestic chickens.
• Zoom in: Oxford-linked research places chicken domestication between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
• The bottom line: Broadly defined, the egg came first; a chicken egg still needs a chicken.

The question of whether the chicken came before the egg, or the egg before the chicken is both familiar and seemingly unsolvable. It has even become something of an epitome for an unanswerable question, something that no one would be expected to answer. It's the type of question that freelancers and those providing ghostwriting services don't have time to think about, something that one may ponder during childhood or some introductory philosophy course. Unlike the question of how many grains of sand need to be piled on top of one another for the pile to be a mound, the chicken-egg problem is not subjective. It is not a paradox.

In fact, the chicken-egg problem does have a very obvious solution. This is due to the way in which he question is set up.

The question asks which came first, the chicken or the egg. One assumes that the question is not concerned with any old chicken or any old egg, but rather the first chicken or the first chicken egg. This assumption, however, is misguided. Due to the vagueness of the question, it could also mean the first chicken or the first egg.

That’s where people usually get tripped up—assuming the question is much more specific than it actually is. If you zoom out just a bit and refuse to get hung up on chickens alone, it all starts to unravel. The moment you let “egg” mean “any egg,” not necessarily a chicken’s, you’ve got millions of years to play with, not just the short timeline since chickens were domesticated from wild junglefowl somewhere in Southeast Asia (and yes, that was somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago according to researchers at the University of Oxford).

Many organisms lay eggs. This list includes fish, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and, in rare instances, mammals. This means that the question of when the first egg was created does not need to focus upon chickens, but, rather, any organism in the above list.

So, in the widest possible sense, eggs are ancient compared to chickens. Single-celled ancestors were “building” with eggs in a manner of speaking, long before anyone thought of an omelet. The fossil record isn’t perfect by any stretch—scientists argue over the definition of the first true “egg,” as it’s not something that leaves behind pristine evidence—but even a conservative estimate puts simple egg-layers well before any creature resembling a chicken scratched the earth. Sorry to break it to the diehard chicken defenders, but they’re the recent arrivals in this timeline.

Evolution has taught us that small, one-celled organisms evolved into multi-celled organisms, and that these organisms then evolved into myriad species. Evolutionary scientists believe that fish appeared on the Earth roughly 500 million years ago. Birds appeared around 150 million years ago. This means that eggs have existed on the Earth for at least 350 million years longer than anything resembling a chicken, and, consequently, that the egg came before the chicken.

Creationism is the theory that God created the Earth and all of its inhabitants without the aid of evolution. He is said to have created both fish and birds on the fifth day. However, he first creates the fish, and then creates the birds. This implies that he created the fish first, and that the female fish would have been created with eggs already inside of them. Again, this leads us to the conclusion that an egg appeared on the Earth prior to any kind of bird. Hence, the egg came before the chicken.

Whether you rely on the teachings of scientists or the teachings of the Bible, it is clear that eggs have been in existence for longer than chickens. Because “the egg” did not clearly denote a specific egg, it must be assumed that it is referring to the first egg, not the first chicken egg. This is why I believe it is obvious that the egg came before the chicken.