John Lennon was on the money.
This question is not new. Ancient philosophers Aristotle, Plutarch and Macrobius considered it, as has the modern genius Stephen Hawking. The ‘chicken or egg’ dilemma isn’t just a matter of biological evolution but also one of impasse. Still, you can have fun asking and answering this question using evolutionary knowledge many of us take for granted.
If you’ve read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species you might know the answer already.
It’s the egg. To put it extremely simply, a very close genetic relative of the chicken laid an egg that featured a mutation. The mutation may have occurred during conception, or within the egg itself, giving rise to what we consider a chicken. Indeed, scientists believe the modern chicken is a hybrid of the red junglefowl and the grey junglefowl.
I’m sure acolytes of the Book of Genesis have a problem with the above, but feel free to ‘Be fruitful, and multiply’.
Short answer: John Lennon said it best when he sang “I am the egg man”.
