Humans have struggled for untold centuries to solve the riddle.
Which came first… The chicken or the egg?
Even though the question can be phrased in the simplest possible language, our finest scientists and philosophers have thus far failed to agree upon the answer.
Of course, this is not the only essential question with which humankind has grappled, unsuccessfully. Many other seemingly insoluble controversies also await explication. “What’s the best way to get out spaghetti sauce stains?” is one that comes immediately to mind.
But this morning, I intend to tackle the chicken-or-egg conundrum — and hopefully make some headway, for society’s ultimate benefit.
If we harken back to one of the earliest known origin stories, we find this explanation:
Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
It’s pretty obvious, here, that God made the chickens — the hen, and the rooster — along with every the other winged creature, and let them figure out for themselves the mechanics of multiplication.
Back when this story was popular, people were easily able to answer the question. The chicken came first. God made chickens, and the chickens then learned how to lay eggs. (And for the moment, the chicken didn’t have to worry about human beings coming around, looking for omelet-making materials, because — according to the story — there weren’t any people yet.)
But scientists and philosophers, being who they are, were not content to leave well enough alone. They began to realize that the thousands of existent animal species could not possibly have fit into Noah’s Ark, so obviously, at least some of the birds and animals must have “evolved” from the few dozen species that had clambered off the Ark. God made some of the animals, back in the day — the fifth day, to be exact — but some animal species must have come into existence since The Flood.
This only made sense.
Not only did it make sense, it also opened the doors to the idea of evolution, which subsequently got totally out of hand, to a point where scientists and philosophers felt comfortable proposing that God hadn’t actually made any of the animals in the form we now find them, but rather, that Life evolved quite by accident over millions and millions of years — and continues to evolve, quite by accident. (Or by ‘natural selection’, which is essentially the same thing.)
This story has attracted quite a following lately, and I’d be willing to bet that most people nowadays firmly believe that today’s chickens somehow evolved from the Archaeopteryx, or from a cousin of the Archaeopteryx.
Thankfully, our modern chickens have a lot more meat on their bones than Archaeopteryx did. But be that as it may, the theory of evolution has turned the chicken-or-egg dilemma on its head. For centuries, people had assumed that God had made chickens and chickens had then laid eggs. But when people started to believe that Archaeopteryx gradually evolved from a flying dinosaur into something closely resembling a chicken, but which wasn’t exactly a chicken… yet… then there comes a point in the story where the next creature that eventually emerges from one particular egg, on one particular sunny day, is — ta da! — the world’s very first chicken, looking (and perhaps tasting) slightly different from its mother.
Thus, the egg came first.
Many folks still cling to the biblical story as ‘true’ in a literal sense — there are certainly quite a few of them — and they will argue the ‘Chicken Came First’ perspective until they’re blue in the face. Just as many folks completely reject the biblical story and believe, to their core, that ‘The Egg Came First’ based on the theory of evolution.
But most folks, if we want to be honest about it, have not taken the time to formulate a firm opinion. Most folks are more concerned about a different (but somewhat related) question.
Which came first… The Chicken McNuggets or the Egg McMuffin?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.