When A Leaf Turns

I decided today to try and tackle the age old question: “Which came first; the chicken or the egg?” Here’s my conclusion: It really depends on your belief system.

If you believe that God (or any other deity) created the universe, the earth, and all of life (i.e. Creationism), then the chicken must have come first. Presumably the Deity created all living creatures whole and intact, since those creatures that have live births had nothing to be birthed from yet. After that they began to reproduce in the way that we understand it today. In other words, the chicken was created whole and only later began to lay eggs for reproduction.

If you believe in evolution instead of creationism, then the egg must have come first. Before the chicken as we know it today could appear, there had to be some proto-chickens, whose DNA and morphology were very similar, but which were not yet entirely chickens. One of them (or possibly more than one) then had offspring with the specific mutation that was the chicken. And of course before that first chicken hatched, it was an egg.

Of course, the major flaw in this reasoning is the conclusion about what is or is not possible and/or likely with creationism. Frankly, if there is an independent intelligence that caused all of the universe, we can’t possibly know anything about what they would or would not do let alone why. They could have created everything whole and intact except for chickens, which for no apparent reason were created as eggs first. That’s absolutely possible, and we have no way to even guess at the likelihood of that.

Meanwhile, the evolutionary perspective seems pretty concrete to me. I personally don’t see how evolution could have created a chicken without having it hatch from an egg first. Unless, of course, a bird like creature evolved which had live births, and at the exact same instant that it evolved the chicken itself, it also spontaneously mutated the entire egg laying process. I guess it’s possible, but incredibly improbable.

So I guess in the end my conclusion that Creationism = Chicken and Evolution = Egg isn’t necessarily the answer, but it seems the most likely to be true…depending on what you believe, of course.