What came first the chicken or the egg?

You'll find an excellent discussion of the matter here:

http://www.answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=166502

You might also be interested in this wonderful parable about embryos,
from T.H. White's "The Once and Future King":

http://web.archive.org/web/20021108203652/http://wanderingrabbit.com/random/excerpts.html

The chicken. You said it yourself "What came first THE CHICKEN or the egg?"

In this sentence, the chicken came first. You will note that ANY time
this question is asked "the chicken" is always mentioned first. No one
ever asks, "What came first the egg or the chicken?"

By the manner of your question I have to assume that subconsiously you
already know the answer and since this evidence is all we have to go
by, the answer is (as best I can tell), the chicken.

Regards;
tutuzdad-ga

Since the egg predates Gallus Domesticus by a few hundred million
years, the egg?s got it by a nose. Similarly, of course the tree makes
a noise, but the state of Shrodinger?s cat is indeterminate.

Best

For tutuzdad:

In spanish the common way to ask this question (at least in my
country, Argentina) is:
¿Que fue primero el huevo o la gallina? tranlated the question is
"What came first the egg or the chicken?", so the answer changes wityh
languages!!!


For surgicalmist1:
for me the egg came first, who develop the egg?, my answer for that
question is the last ancestor of the chicken (which did not be a
chicken, but was the previous mutation). I based my answer in the
evolution theory.

The egg came first.  It is the more basic form of the two.  Now, where
the egg came from is something that'll win you Nobel prize.

Obviously, there were eggs around long before chickens showed up --
dinosaur eggs and fish eggs are a couple easy ones.

I think the philosophical question would actually be:

What came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?  :-P

My answer is at question 433140.

I loved all your comments. Thanks alot for discussing this. But here's
what I think: Birds must have evolved from a life form a long time ago
right? And I think the theory that states birds evolved from dinosaurs
is correct. Nevermind that though, what I'm saying is we can say that
a dinosaur once layed an egg that an infant which later grew feathers
came out of. This mean that by time dinosaurs of a specific species
started to look like birds (or chickens) more and more each time an
dinosaur was born. Therefore, the first perfect bird (or chicken) must
have come out from a dinosaur egg. To sum up, we can say that the egg
was there before the chicken.