[xmprt]

You're right but for the people who are confused, it's because of the semantics of the question. If you specify the question a little more and ask "What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg" then the question is how do you define a chicken egg. Is it the egg that comes from a chicken or the egg that a chicken hatches from.

In the first case, the chicken came first and in the second case, the egg came first. I think it's obvious the the second case makes more sense but some people might argue.

[coldtea]

The deeper question is not really about which came before in any random pair of "chicken and its chicken egg" or "chicken egg and its chicken".

It's about how chickens and chicken eggs emerge (first means "very very first"), and it's supposed to point to this paradox: If you need both chickens to have chicken eggs, and chicken eggs to produce a chicken, how did either came about?

E.g. did something non-chicken-yet that could lay eggs suddenly laid a chicken egg? Or did a non-chicken egg suddenly produce a chicken? and so on...

[vletal]

Even if you put it like that, it is the egg that a chicken hatches from. The other option does not work at all.

[Kranar]

Oh, so if a chicken doesn't hatch from the egg then it's not a chicken egg?

[jonny_eh]

It's not even that simple. Evolution occurs gradually, so gradually in fact that there is no "first" chicken. Any given chicken/ancestor you pick will be so genetically close to its parents/children, that they're the same species by any definition.

Another way of putting the paradox is "Which chicken arrived first, the chicken or its parent"?

[vletal]

Chicken. If we establish some trait of a chicken we could be able to trace the first bird wich had the specific gene combination and it's parents had not. Still a well defined non paradox.