[saghm]

Probably off-topic, but the chicken and the egg "paradox" always seemed silly to me in the context of evolution. We know that there were birds long before chickens, so at some point, the first bird that we would consider to be in the species "chicken" had to hatch from an egg from a bird that was _not_ a chicken, so the egg came first. (This assumes that the question is specifically about chicken eggs; it's even simpler if you count non-chicken eggs from the ancestors of the first chicken, but the logic still works even if you don't).

[nurettin]

There is no paradox, because there was never a non-chicken parent which was so different that we could consider the newborn chicken a new species. It takes thousands of generations to say such things, not one.

[saghm]

You have the draw the line _somewhere_ though, right? If not biologically, at least linguistically we don't call other birds chickens, and we don't call other animals with shared common ancestors chickens, and I don't think that you can argue that the common ancestors of chickens and, say, primates, can be referred to as both "human" without being prescriptivist to the point that you'd be dictating rules that essentially zero English speakers actually follow.

To be clear, I don't disagree with you that my argument makes little sense biologically; my point is that the question itself is phrased in a way that doesn't really parse correctly in a scientific sense. To me, it reads more like a semantics question (i.e. it depends on your definition of "chicken" and "egg) because the only way to get a scientifically precise answer is to expand the definition of "chicken" beyond recognition.

[nurettin]

Yes, we need to draw a line and the question seems flawed. Sure, it makes you think, it is funny, but it contains an invalid assumption that the line's width is a single generation. If we assume that the question is about species, it takes thousands of generations for an offspring not to be able to reproduce with its ancestors.

[tialaramex]

And this "it's a chicken" versus "it's not a chicken" distinction is ours, Mother Nature doesn't care whether these are chickens or not, the chickens do not make such a distinction. Same with particle/ wave duality, Mother Nature doesn't care whether light is a particle or not, that's our model and if it doesn't work too good it's our fault.

[867-5309]

the chicken is just an example of an egg-laying and -borne animal. substitute it with the first

[OJFord]

I think that changes the answer by GP's logic though, since then the first egg-layer obviously came before its egg.

[OJFord]

Or to take it another direction - how do they gestate? At what point can we call it a chicken and when does the shell (assuming that's what would make us call it an egg) develop?