The Chicken Came First Or The Egg
Evolutionary genetics has the actual answer
This age-old chicken-egg question appears trivial and inconsequential but it’s not. I don’t know who asked it first but among those who tried to answer it are the great Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plutarch, the 5th-century Roman philosopher Macrobius, Christian theologian St Thomas Aquinas, 18th-century French philosopher and author Denis Diderot, 19th-century English novelist Samuel Butler, and scores of others in between. Nobody’s answer, however, was convincing enough and it remained a conundrum. Being the chosen people to experience the information age, can we do better? To find an answer, let’s turn to the sage of our times — Google.
A quick google search will give you an answer — spoiler alert — in favor of the egg. The explanation goes somewhat along these lines: Archaeological evidence suggests the existence of eggs more than 190 million years ago — long before birds emerged on the scene. Somewhere down the line, a chicken-like-but-not-quite-chicken bird lay an egg that had just about enough mutations to hatch into a chicken. The chicken’s immediate ancestor is debatable though the Indonesian junglefowl is considered a strong candidate. Whatever the ancestor may be, the fact remains that the first egg which gave birth to a chicken was not laid by a chicken.
This answer, however, entirely misses the point of the question which has attracted renowned philosophers and scientists over centuries in the first place.
The correct answer but the wrong explanation
For philosophers like Aristotle and Plutarch, the question was interesting because it represented an unsolvable paradox — the Greeks loved paradoxes. In this regard, Aristotle’s perspective made perfect sense without actually making any sense: “There could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there would have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.”
For the theologians, the question was important as the answer lay in the sacred teachings and had bearings on the Genesis theory and creation ex nihilo. For them, the chicken must come first, created by God out of nothing, like the ancestors of all other living beings.
The answer commonly cited using fossil records takes the question too literally, restricting it to its words only and forgoes the broader view. Whatever chicken-like bird lay the egg which hatched into a chicken, it was still a bird. Perhaps, rephrasing the question may explain this point better. Something like whether the seed came first or the tree. Chicken and egg in this phrase are simply metaphors for the mechanism of beginning and perpetuation of life. Samuel Butler wasn’t aware of genes (they weren’t discovered it) or genetics and he was actually talking about ideas rather than living beings when he said this: “ Chicken is an eggs way of making another egg”. This, however, captures the essence of how a century later evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would put forward his ground-breaking theory of the selfish gene, in his famous book of the same name. This is where a more fundamental answer to our question lies.
The egg is the master, chicken is the emissary
What exactly is an egg? Its a blueprint for creating a chicken. All the information resides in DNA inside the egg. With each cell division, a new copy of the DNA would be created, so that each cell in a mature chicken will contain the exact same DNA. The whole purpose of a gene ( a piece of DNA capable of producing a protein) is to replicate itself. It is selfish, Dawkins argued. The gene doesn’t give a dam about the creature, it simply wants to replicate itself. To this end, it weaves a case of proteins around itself which becomes the body of the organism (the chicken in our case). This covering allows it to live on and make copies of its own, all the while protecting it from factors like radiations, etc. In Samuel Butler’s words, the body is the genes way of making more genes. The story of chicken-egg, and essentially of life, then goes like this: Millions of years ago, in the primordial sea of molecules, a molecule emerged — purely by chance — with the crucial property of self-replication. This was the nucleic acid (DNA, RNA)— the egg. Proteins were almost a byproduct of the DNA copying itself but enabled it to produce encasement of living bodies, which further improved its chances of survival and replication.
Dawkins idea places gene (or DNA) at the center stage of life and relegates organisms (including humans) to the position of mere vehicles, used by genes to perpetuate. Understandably, it appeared preposterous to many when it appeared first in the 1970s. A wider understanding has followed, though not everyone is sold — yet. For us, it settles the debate of the chicken-egg question at a more fundamental level. Congratulations egg, you have won!
