I dont know but it does make you think....
I found this
[edit] Evolution
As species change over time, in the process of
evolution, the first modern chicken was the offspring of the last direct ancestor of domestic chickens to not share that classification (likely the
Red Junglefowl). Therefore, a non-chicken did, in fact, lay the first egg.
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However, the problem may not even be relevant from this perspective, as evolution is a slow and gradual process. The birds and their eggs evolved from an ancestor species into the species we have today over millennia, a time frame that vastly obscures the reproductive cycle between chicken and egg. At no point was a "chicken egg" created from a distinct "non-chicken" species.
This lack of distinction characterizes the blurry boundaries scientists erect between species and sub-species, whose differences are only apparent when referencing mutually isolated points along the time line (or between concurrently diverging species of a common ancestor) that show significantly dissimilar genetic information. Tiny genetic perturbations are being made
each generation, and it should be clarified that these differences are between the generations themselves; the egg and the chicken it becomes are identical. Therefore, one may say for semantical purposes that the egg possesses the new genetic information before the chicken, simply because the egg precedes the chicken. But again, what makes this egg the first "chicken-to-be", and not its parents?
What was referred to as a chicken two thousand years ago is not exactly what a chicken is today, and the human
classification of a species must evolve with the species until it becomes necessary to begin a new classification. If a specific generation possesses the genetic signature of what humans would technically classify as a chicken for the first time, then the egg has come first. However, this would be a vain effort, as the requirements would be arbitrary, and would be no different than declaring the next generation of domestic chicken the beginnings of a new species.
The nature of species classification is inherently
macroscopic in time and is not compatible with the distinction between an organism and its offspring. The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, is
ill defined, with no logical answer.
One could leapfrog from chicken all the way back to the beginnings of life in search of an origin, but eventually what constitutes an egg becomes unclear, as life originally reproduced through metabolic division. Whatever the case, the classical question becomes complicated, and serves to show that such a narrow, black-and-white attitude is not useful in philosophical analysis of life.
If thats not confussing as hell, "this is".
[edit] Definitions
In this case, the egg is assumed to be a chicken's egg. This is an obvious assumption since the question itself implies a link between the two.
If one assumes the egg to be a chicken egg then one must define what a chicken egg is:
- If: A chicken egg will hatch a chicken
Then a bypass is allowed: An animal that was not a chicken laid the chicken egg which contained the first chicken. In this case the egg came first.
- If: A chicken egg is the egg that a chicken lays
Then a bypass is allowed: A chicken (that hatched from a non-chicken egg) laid an egg (a chicken egg).
- If: A chicken egg will hatch a chicken and was laid by a chicken
Then there may be an error of definition. If the definition of "chicken" used does not refer to "chicken eggs," then the chicken must come first, because without chickens there cannot be any chicken eggs.
- If: The question didn't specify that the egg had to be a chicken egg
Then we could easily say that the egg came first, because fish had been laying eggs long before chickens were around.
- If: The chicken came first because it had to hatch the egg
Then the riddle would make more sense, but would still be deba