The Chicken & Egg Problem
The timeless riddle goes:
Chicken, or egg, which came first?
Applied to a truly isolated system, at a fixed instant of time where both entities co-exist, such a question will throw any one logical entity into and endless loop of back-and-forth reasoning.
In the real world where time flows and no system is truly isolated from another — in fact all is in one system where all within co-interact, and nothing is without — the “chicken & egg” problem has multitude of possible solutions. One of them being, using Darwinian’s evolution as a basis, neither came first because there is not a specific instance of time when there was any one chicken coming into existence from nothing, and the same applies to the chicken egg.
Extending Darwin’s theory, the chicken today is not the chicken from yesterday, neither is that chicken the one from last year. The subspecies as a whole undergoes constant evolution, and from there, if we extrapolate backwards in time, the chicken at some point (say, 20,000 years ago) was not not very much alike the chicken we have today. What about even further back — say, 200,000 years ago? The fact is that, it is not possible to pick an instant in time bordering the evolution of egg-laying, non-chicken ancestors into egg-laying chickens. No, not even with time machines or incredibly advanced fossil dating technology. The issue is not one of physical limitation, but one stemming from the ambiguous dictionary definition of the term “chicken,” though we commonly link them to the subspecies G. g. domesticus (or, to be more general, the species G. gallus).
That said, the above has two important implications:
1) It means that chickens are not egg-laying pioneers, per se.
Their ancestors and ancestor’s ancestors were already reproducing by means of egg-laying for millions of years prior. This means that before there were even chickens, there were eggs.
2) We do not know when non-chickens first produced chickens.
Rather, we are unable define when.
Nevertheless, we see a glimmer of hope if we follow closely this line of reasoning: non-chickens came before chickens → non-chickens laid eggs → eggs existed before chickens.
So the riddle is solved then? That the egg came first?
The answer, for now at least, is a curious “it depends.”
It really depends on whether in the riddle, “egg” refers to eggs in general, chicken eggs specifically. We will be sensible and consider both cases.
Case 1: “Chicken, or egg(s, in general), which came first?”
Trivially, the answer is: the egg came first. Quoting myself from above:
Their ancestors and ancestor’s ancestors were already reproducing by means of egg-laying for millions of years prior. This means that before there were even chickens, there were eggs.
This is a somewhat anti-climatic resolution to the centuries-old riddle. For the sake of a more satisfying answer (and of course, for completeness), we must consider the other case.
Case 2: “Chicken, or (chicken) egg(s), which came first?”
Now, to explore this further, we need to establish a trivial but significant fact. We know that chickens must come from chicken eggs, and that chicken eggs necessarily produce chickens, or nothing otherwise (i.e. unsuccessful incubation).
With that in mind, recall my earlier argument regarding the technical difficulty of placing the point in evolution at which non-chicken ancestors started producing chickens, all the while reproducing via egg-laying. But what if I told you that we need not go through the pains of redefining the biological taxonomy of egg-laying animals in order to arrive at a solution to this impossible riddle?
Let me lay it all out very simply.
So far, we’ve established that:
… → chicken egg → chicken → chicken egg → …
… → non-chicken egg → non-chicken → non-chicken egg → …
Since non-chickens came about before chickens, it follows that:
non-chicken → non-chicken egg … → evolution → … chicken
Also, chickens must come from chicken eggs. Then, deriving from above:
… → evolution → chicken-egg → chicken
Entirely circumnavigating the technical complexities involved in defining the moment in history when non-chickens evolved into chickens, we considered a workaround that utilizes simple deduction to arrive at the conclusion where it is indeed that the egg came before the chicken.
To the riddle “Chicken, or egg, which came first?”, the egg came first.
Thank you all.
