What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Depends on perspective.
Of "chickens" and "eggs" as designs in nature, I'm fairly sure eggs came first.
If you mean "chicken" and "chicken egg", then an evolutionary perspective would arguably minorly favor the chicken egg... though you could argue that it wasn't really a /chicken/ egg before it was fertilized, I guess?
You run into a lot of trouble with defining what a chicken /is/, eventually: is the thing inside the fertilized egg a chicken as soon as the DNA fusion and all is done? Can the chicken be said to exist as a concept if a chicken sperm and chicken egg both exist, but have not yet melded?
These all assume we're interested in what happens inside the proto-hen, of course.
Perhaps the most interesting answer would be that the question is a misnomer: if a chicken egg exists, it has a chicken fetus inside it; thus, they must have both come at the same time.
tl;dr pretty much either neither or the egg
Of "chickens" and "eggs" as designs in nature, I'm fairly sure eggs came first.
If you mean "chicken" and "chicken egg", then an evolutionary perspective would arguably minorly favor the chicken egg... though you could argue that it wasn't really a /chicken/ egg before it was fertilized, I guess?
You run into a lot of trouble with defining what a chicken /is/, eventually: is the thing inside the fertilized egg a chicken as soon as the DNA fusion and all is done? Can the chicken be said to exist as a concept if a chicken sperm and chicken egg both exist, but have not yet melded?
These all assume we're interested in what happens inside the proto-hen, of course.
Perhaps the most interesting answer would be that the question is a misnomer: if a chicken egg exists, it has a chicken fetus inside it; thus, they must have both come at the same time.
tl;dr pretty much either neither or the egg
