Question: Which came first – the chicken or the egg?

I’ve been getting a lot of funny questions from you guys lately and while Financial Jesus is usually a personal finance oriented website I decided to answer a funny but timeless question that was sent using the question box.

Today’s question was sent by Baz from York, England and is the following:

The many answers

The question what came first – the chicken or the egg is actually a very old one. It goes back more than 2000 years.

According to philosophy

The legendary Greek philosopher Aristotle concluded that both the egg and the chicken had always existed. Here is his logic:

According to the Bible

If you believe in the Bible the correct answer is that the chicken came first. Here is an excerpt from the Genesis:

So if you are a believer this settles it.

For those atheists like me who need some more proof, keep on reading and you’ll get the correct answer.

The Correct Answer

In 2006, a team made up of a geneticist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer found the correct answer.

The egg came before the chicken.

The reason for this is simple – the genetic material of a living being does not change during an animal’s lifetime. This means that an animal can’t simply mutate into another animal but it has to give birth (or lay an egg) for a genetic mutation to occur.

The egg was probably laid by a bird similar to a hen but not actually a hen.

Professor John Bookfield a evolutionary geneticist from University of Nottingham agreed: “The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken it would develop into, not the DNA of his parents.”

The British organization of  chicken farmers – Great British Chicken –  also agrees:

“Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived. Of course, they may not have been chicken eggs as we see them today, but they were eggs.”

What do you think?

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