The Chicken and the Egg

This is one of my pet peeves this perennial and retarded question "what came first, the chicken or the egg?". This question is supposed to be one you cannot answer and people look at you smugly as if to say - "what do you think of that then? can you get your head round that?"

Frankly, yes I bleeding well can thanks very much.

There's a quick way around this and a long way around this.

Even quicker is to say "who cares" but so sick am I of the whole thing I really want to to lay the issue to rest for myself and hopefully by osmosis resolve the question for the whole world.

First; the quick way:

DINOSAURS LAID EGGS.

If you mean chicken eggs, read on.

The initial appearance of any species is described differently to people who believe in;

1. Divine creation
   
2. Evolution

NB there is no allowance for intelligent design here because the whole concept is, in my view, little different from divine creation wearing a new coat. Please continue...

Dealing with the first of these is simple and quick too. God created Animals on the fifth day and not their unborn forms, so if my reading of Genesis is correct, you can unequivocally say that the Chicken came first. You may believe that in fact God created the chicken inside the egg in order to start life as he meant to go on. Fair enough, but you in this case would answer "egg".

In neither of the God hypotheses is there any sense that the question is unanswerable. Quite the opposite.

In the evolutionary sense things are a lot more complicated. The way I'd put it is that the first chicken in the modern sense, say chicken(x) was the child of a different animal, not a different species (or it would have been an abberation as opposed to a permanent mutation) so what we have is a parent called chicken(x-1)* which is an intermediate between the two species of chickens as they are now, and their nearest common ancestor with another animal, ducks, say.

The order of births can be shown in the following way. I am showing five generations as ashort hand but I have no idea how many intermediates there were.

Common Ancestor - egg - Chicken (x-5) - egg - Chicken (x-4) - egg - Chicken (x-3) - egg - chicken (x-2) - egg - Chicken (x-1) - egg - Chicken (x)

The issue to think about here is that of the nature of that crucial final egg before chicken(x) hatches. Is it a Egg (x-1) or and Egg (x).

In short is it a chicken egg or an intermediate egg with a chicken in it?

My view is that this is an egg(x-1) with a chicken inside it and therefore the answer to the "unanswerable" question is that the Chicken came before its first egg.

The contrary position is that the egg could be a modern chicken egg. That is to say it is an Egg(x) ratherthan an egg(x-1) and therefore you would be saying that the egg came before the chicken.

However you feel about your conclusion - it is clear to me that without a doubt a conclusion to this question can be reached and we can put the whole sorry subject to bed.

A



*that is to say, minus one intermediate specieslet - the parents of the first chicken if you like. minus two would be the next intermediate backwards, and so on. To describe future intermediate evolutions I would use Chicken(x+1) etc.