Which came first between the chicken or the egg? I say, the chicken...

The classical question that most people don't know how to answer, but when looking at it through the eyes of Science, it's quite simple to figure out

First off all let's start with some antecedents.

This question probably date back into the first days when chicken lived along humans. The first written record comes from great Greek philosophers. Aristotle tried to answer the question and in the end deduced that both must have existed since the beginning. Likewise, he share with Plato the idea that because of phenomenons like this, every species alive on planet Earth should have existed since eternity as "spirits" before obtaining physical bodies.

Aristotle and Plato having a chat

Obviously, on those times there weren't any of the scientific advances we enjoy today, and provides us with tools to correctly answer this question (and by the way, this is interesting because it proves us that it's possible to use science and technology to answer questions with paradoxical answers, more on this for other posts)

The trick here is to add Evolution to this equation

It happens that thanks to science we know that everything alive today evolved from other species through genetic mutations.

Besides, today we can know for sure our chickens are in reality a crossing between the red pheasant and the grey pheasant.

With this information we can put together the next answer

The Red Pheasant

When this 2 animals crossed between each other, they created a egg (which at time either was a red pheasant egg or a grey pheasant egg, depending on who was the female and male). However, the new genetic component of what a chicken would be had to be formed inside this egg, because genetic changes can only happen before a being is born.

Therefore, the first thing being born was a chicken, and only after that, the chicken put her first egg, the first chicken egg.

Now, there might be some people who may want to go a little bit further and ask, if the chicken were a direct mutation of a grey pheasant or a red pheasant instead of both, then who was the first to be born? And the logic would be the same as before. Inside a female red pheasant (for example, the same applies to the grey one), at some point the fetus had a mutation which converted it into a "white" chicken of today. From the red pheasant egg the first "white" chicken was born, who subsequently started to put white chicken eggs... So in this case, the chicken also would end up coming before the egg itself.

The Grey Pheasant

But what if we go even more deeper?

What if we go back in time, and ask ourself: who was the animal who create the first egg? doesn't the paradox continues?. The answer and its logic is still the same as before.

At some point, a genetic mutation caused a fetus to obtain the ability to later on, be able to "harden" her placenta (if you think about it, an egg is nothing more than a hardened placenta), which means this first animal that was born from a "soft" placenta, when being adult would end up using this ability in order to have a "hard" placenta like an egg.

Or in other words, the animal who create the first egg, came first than the egg itself.