h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The answer to this is much simpler than most people make it out to be. Nowhere in the question does it state that it must be a chicken egg. It just says "the egg". Chickens weren't around when the first egg was produced. Which means that the egg was first.

I'm not 100% happy with this entry, even though I wrote it. I started out with exactly the idea you've just stated, but along the way I realised that the more important question was "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg". I know that this can also be answered by the scientific approach and the answer is "the chicken egg", but I have yet to convince everybody.

I doubt that will ever happen.

Heh. Came across this while up to my ears in .

Of course, 'egg' is just a different phase of chickenhood, or as the quantum physicists would say, 'egg' and 'chicken' are in superposition. So the answer to which came first is, of course, 'yes'.

quiz
(talking out of my hat...)

Chicken egg. Is that an egg that came out of a chicken, or does it have a babychicken in it?
If it's the first, then the first chicken came out of a proto-chicken egg...
Therefore, the chicken came before the chickenegg...

Put that way, which came first, the chicken egg or the chicken, I'd have to say that it takes a chicken to lay a chicken egg, whatever laid the egg the chicken hatched from.

More afterthoughts: So, if we're agreed that the first chicken hatched from an egg, it cannot have hatched from a chicken's egg, there being no prior chicken to take custody of it, the egg therefore being that of whatever creature incubated the egg and nurtured the chick, whatever kind of creature that may been.