The chicken and the egg riddle is a linguistics problem. Depends

>>7767107
>"The egg, laid by an animal that was not a chicken"
>- Neil D. Tyson

>>7767107
A chicken just means a chicken. If you wanted to communicate that it is male you would say rooster. For the purpose of the 'paradox' it is assumed that the chicken is a hen.
Anyway the answer is the egg.

>>7767125
Maybe just in the english language. Other languages have a name for the baby and another one for the grown animal.

>>7767109
That's impossible, an animal could not have produced offspring of a different species.

>>7767398
If I didn't know better, I would of thought you were serious.

>>7767400
Species change over time. Eventually you get an animal that wouldn't be able to breed with its ancestor X generations ago. So they were the same species then, but not from our perspective in the present.

>>7767400
>What is evolution

>>7767407
But no individual animal could lay a chicken egg and not already be a chicken itself.

>>7767407
While that may be true, any individual change is small, such that it's nonsense to say that the animal which laid a chicken egg was not a chicken.

>>7767414
It depends on whether you define "chicken egg" as egg that contains a chicken or an egg laid by a chicken.

>>7767414
Wrong. An animal that is one or two mutations away from being a chicken could.

>>7767417
Also wrong. Any animal with only one or two mutations away would still be considered a chicken.

>>7767415
Not really. The line is somewhat arbitrary but it may still be drawn.

>>7767414
>no individual animal could lay a chicken egg and not already be a chicken
The riddle doesn't say "chicken egg".
And it's not really a riddle anyway, it's a general-purpose metaphor for uncertainty.

>>7767419
>Any animal with only one or two mutations away would still be considered a chicken.
What? If we draw a hard line at "chicken vs non-chicken" somewhere in their evolution, any animal on the "not a chicken" side of the line is not a chicken.
It's like asking "how many is many"?
Surely 3 isn't "many".
And 4 is just one more, so that can't be "many" either.
If 4 isn't many, just one more can't be many either, so 5 isn't many.
repeat indefinitely.

>>7767416
>It depends on whether you define "chicken egg" as egg that contains a chicken or an egg laid by a chicken.

This is the entire answer.

>>7767429
Totally Agree. You can not draw any hardlines when it comes to species development, if you do, you fall into the sand pile paradox.

For those who don't know, if you start with a single grain of sand and add a single grain bit by bit? At what number does a pile of sand become a heap?

What you probably had before the chicken was some sort of lean bird that produced a slightly fatter more domestically acceptable offspring, and these slight changes culminated into the chicken. A chicken could probably reproduce with the transition species but not the original lean bird anymore.

>>7767444
Wait but we can define a new species as an animal which cannot breed with the species it branches off from?

At some point then, would an organism appear which cannot breed with its own mother?
If that were the case, how would it mate and develop into a new species?

>>7767457
There is no point at which an organism cannot breed with its own mother, that's the point. It's always one species.

>>7767521
So there is no point at which an organism cannot breed with its own mother, but there is a point at which an organism, in theory, could breed with its own ancestor?

>>7767525
Yes.

>>7767415
Actually it should be an ancestor of the chicken gave birth to an individual that had the specificity of laying eggs, and that specimen laid an egg of a closer ancestor of the chicken.

>>7767173
>name for the baby

Chick

>>7767107
that's not linguistics

op didnt get the point

>>7767107
No, it's a question of taxonomy and evolutionary biology, and the answer is that there is no such thing as a first chicken or a first chicken egg, because speciation is blurry.

>>7767400
Millions of years is a long time to you, but not for the miracles of life.

The correct answer is that there is no such thing as a chicken, but instead an evolutionary process that we are witnesses to in a miniscule frame.

The chicken is our objectification of a particular organisms evolutionary lineage at a focal, frozen point.

>>7767107
That's just avoiding the problem. The fact of the matter is that a chicken, whether male or female is produced by a chicken egg. Simply changing the gender of the chicken being hatched doesn't solve the problem.

The only way to logically resolve the problem is through evolution, as other anons have suggested.

At some point, there was a pre-proto-chicken that laid the egg that hatched the proto-chicken that then began laying eggs that would hatch what we now know as the modern chicken. This is of course disgustingly over simplified, and pretty much ignores the modern understanding of speciation, but the point is the same. The answer with this understanding is simple, and based on how one defines a chicken egg.

If a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, the proto-chicken came first, therefore the chicken came first.

If a chicken egg is an egg that hatches a chicken, then the pre-proto-chicken's egg came first, and therefore the egg came first.

>>7771247
>The answer with this understanding is simple, and based on how one defines a chicken egg.
No, because no matter how you define it, the transition you are talking about doesn't exist. There is no first chicken. There is no first chicken egg. Therefore asking which came first is a nonsense question.

>>7771250
I'll agree that speciation doesn't work like that, but the point stands that at some point an egg was laid containing a chicken-like bird that had genetics sufficiently similar to the modern chicken to be called a chicken, while its parents differed ever so slightly enough to not be called chicken. I'm not really a biology guy, but from what I recall from AP bio back in HS, this isn't contradictory to modern biology.

If someone wanted to start from scratch, controling the evolution ( And almost more importantly size! ) of a population for millions and billions of years, with a pre-determined percentage of the modern chicken genome being the end goal, there would eventually be an egg laid that contained that percentage of chicken genome. Sure, with continued breeding it may drop, and its offspring may not be true chickens, but with more time ( And more selective breeding ), the average percentage of that genome in the population would rise, eventually high enough to call the population identical modern chickens, but there would always be a proto-chicken.

This is the scenario I was picturing when I explained it in my last post, and I clearly didn't explain it enough. If I'm wrong on any of it the point is moot anyway, but I'm certain that this is a resolution to the paradox, or whatever category of logical hole this falls in to.

The ova is a single cell, which came before multicellular organisms. The egg came first.