Which came first - the chicken or the egg?

Many people think that there is still some intrigue about this popular question. However, science has long given the answer to it: the first was the egg.

Generally speaking, the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, originally lay in the field of philosophy. It was formulated a very long time ago and offered speculations about where the beginning of cyclical processes is. To convey the original meaning of this question more accurately, it is better to rephrase it in the following question: "Where is the beginning of the ring?"

However with the development of sciences to the present moment, this issue in its original formulation has migrated to the field of biology. This gave it a very specific answer. However, a little philosophising still remained in him.

The fact is that the question of which came first, a chicken or an egg, naturally implies a chicken egg (and not a crocodile's egg, for example). Otherwise, the question would not be interesting at all, because it is clear that eggs as such, together with oviparous animals, appeared much earlier than such a biological species as “chicken”.

So, we are talking about a chicken egg. However, the term "chicken egg" or "an egg of a chicken" can be interpreted in different ways. So a chicken egg can be understood as:
• An egg with a chicken inside, i.e. from which the chicken will hatch (this approach is used in science);
• The egg that the chicken laid.

And now we will describe (very roughly and simplified, but nevertheless fair enough for the topic under consideration) the process of the appearance of the first chicken:
• So, once upon a time there was a biological species on Earth, let's call it “the great-chicken”.
• One of these chickens, with the help of a great-rooster, conceived an egg. Initially, an egg is just one single cell.
• Even in the process of conception, a mutation occurred in this egg (in this cell), and the resulting organism was already a future chicken.
• The great-chicken laid an egg.
• After proper development, a hen hatched from the egg.

So, if we assume that the "chicken egg" is an egg with a chicken inside, then it is now obvious that the egg appeared first, and the dispute immediately stops.

However, the proponents of the idea that the "hen's egg" is the egg laid by the hen will call this egg from which the first hen appeared the "great-chicken’s egg". Thus, allegedly, a chicken first appeared from the "great-chicken" egg, and then it began to lay full-fledged chicken eggs, ie. supposedly the chicken was the first. However, all these are arguments stretched out of thin air, which are not scientific, but are presented by the disputants only for the sake of continuing the dispute.

But in fact, there is no difference at all in what is meant by a "chicken egg". This does not change the essence of the matter, because the first chicken, one way or another, emerged from an egg (of a chicken or great-chicken). Thus, the egg appeared first.

By the way, the evolutionary process is very slow and has been going on constantly for millions of years. It involves thousands and thousands of generations of various living organisms. In each generation, the evolutionary "step" is very small, virtually zero. You can never say that this animal was, for example, a great-chicken, but that it had a baby, and this baby is already a chicken. Differences between parents and children will always be minimal.

Many mutations in many more and more new organisms lead to gradual change in the species. The fact is that under the influence of external factors (the abundance and type of food, methods of its production, the number and types of predators and other dangers, as well as many other things), successfully mutated organisms survive and multiply more, and over time, some successful mutation becomes characteristic of all organisms of this developing species. And another successful mutation inherent in another group of similar organisms, perhaps, becomes the beginning for a new species, which further develops in its own way.

However, this remark does not affect the answer to the question of which appeared first, the chicken or the egg. It's just that our explanation above needs to be expanded not to one great-chicken, one egg and one chicken, but to thousands of generations of such organisms. And all the same it will be clear that initially there were great-chickens, they carried eggs, and organisms closer to the chicken emerged from them. Thus, the chicken, and thousands of generations of its ancestors, emerged from eggs. That is, the sequence is preserved: the chicken, then the egg, then the chicken. So the egg remains the first.