Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?
Statement
The chicken.
Q1 Analysis
This is not a Q1 violation if both "chicken" and "egg" are defined consistently.
Q2 Analysis
This is not a Q2 violation.
Discussion
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" often serves as an example of a question that is either unanswerable or ridiculous. However, whether or not the question has an answer depends on how one defines "egg." In this context, would you say that an egg is:
- An egg laid by a chicken.
- An egg from which a chicken will hatch.
- Any egg.
- Not well defined.
These definitions lead to many possible answers to the question, including:
- A chicken egg is an egg that came from a chicken; therefore the chicken must have come first.
- A chicken must hatch from an egg, so the egg must have come first.
- God created animals, not eggs, so the chicken came first.
- From an evolutionary perspective, a non-chicken can lay an egg from which an animal that has a mutation to make it a chicken will hatch, therefore the egg must have come first.
- Dinosaurs laid eggs before there were chickens, so eggs came first.
- We use "chicken egg" to mean either an egg laid by a chicken (such as the infertile eggs sold in the store) or an egg from which a chicken will hatch (as in a fantasy story in which a lizard lays an egg from which a chicken emerges), so the question needs further clarification.
Any of these answers could pass 2Q, so long as they do not conflict with other beliefs you hold. This highlights the fact that, because some parts of personal philosophy are direct outgrowths of unprovable personal assumptions, two people can hold opposite positions on an issue without being able to say that those who disagree with them are necessarily not reasoning correctly.
Consider the questions below. Which (if any) of them is suitable for analysis with 2Q? Do any of them have more than one possible, reasonable answer?
- If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?
- What is the sound of one hand clapping?
- How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
- What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?
- Can God make a stone so big that he can’t pick it up?
- Why do bad things happen to good people?
- Why do you drive on a parkway but park in a driveway?
- Is the glass half empty or half full?
- Why did the chicken cross the road?
- How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
You are encouraged to leave your answers to the questions posed in this post in the comments section. This post is based on an excerpt from Ask Yourself to be Moral, by D. Cancilla, available at LuLu.com and Amazon.com. See the 2Q system page for details of the philosophical system mentioned in this post.
on March 13, 2011 at 1:57 am
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Why??????????????????
on March 19, 2011 at 10:04 am
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Check out the conclusion from scientists of two leading universities in the UK.
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/835020-the-chicken-came-first-not-the-egg-scientists-prove
Also see renoun athesis darwins humiliated by Dr J C Venter about the so call tree of life
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/venter_vs_dawkins_on_the_tree_044681.html
You should wake up and start believing in our awesome God, Yeshua, as the wheels of the theory of evolution continue to crumble.
on April 18, 2011 at 7:03 pm
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The egg came first, and it was laid by a VERY chicken like creature. Evolution happens on the generational level, therefore the fist “egg containing a chicken” was laid by a creature that was 99.99% chicken..
on May 9, 2011 at 4:00 am
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If what you mean by chicken is an organism that can mate with the general population of what we call chickens now, then it’s far more probable that the egg came first. But evolution doesn’t happen overnight, and I would say that if we saw one, we would term even a non-compatible ancestor a chicken.
on January 27, 2012 at 9:18 am
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The answer avoids answering the critical question. Don’t focus on the chicken. It doesn’t matter that, using an evolutionary model, the first chicken egg came from a non-chicken. What is being asked, philosophically, is what happened first, did a fowl, any fowl, lay and egg, or was the first fowl hatched from the egg? Back up through all evolutionary models – at some point in time, there had to be an animal that hatched an egg. Where did that first egg dropping animal come from? Simple question.
on April 2, 2013 at 6:57 pm
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Well, this is a very interesting question. To answer it, we must go back to the beginning. As we know, the chicken comes from the egg. And the egg comes from the chicken. If we assume that there is a higher power, then the chicken comes first because the higher power would’ve created a chicken to deposit an egg upon the barren waste land that is earth.
However, if we don’t believe in a higher power, which would make you an atheist, then we would most likely examine this question scientifically. Taking account of the fact that chickens come from eggs, we could say that the egg came first. That is, until the fact that the chicken lays the egg is accounted for. If we don’t take said chicken into consideration, we could say that the egg sprung up from the ground. However dirt cannot reproduce, so we would call ourselves idiots for simply entertaining the very notion that eggs can come from the ground.
But another fact that we did not take into account is the chicken’s seedy diet. Since chickens eat seeds, we could say that some of the nutrients from the seeds a chicken eats can contribute towards the production of the eggs. Therefore those of us who face palmed ourselves because we are idiots for entertaining the notion that the eggs can come from the ground could gloat in the faces of the non-believer species. Why? Because chickens eat seedy foods and seeds are in the ground.
In short the question of if the chicken or the egg was the first to exist is not a question of logic, but a question of religion. The question has two possible answers, depending on if you are religious or not. Therefore there is no right or wrong answer to this question and the guy who started the trend of asking the question should be, henceforth, slapped in the face twenty times because he didn’t know that there were two possible answers instead of just one. You’re welcome.