PHILOSOPHY
The Egg Came Before the Chicken
The simple question has more philosophical subtext than you might realize
Author’s note: after writing this article, I noticed that Roy Sorensen published an academic paper, The Egg Came Before the Chicken, in the philosophy journal Mind. The premise of that paper is sufficiently similar to this article that you might take what I say here to be an accessible (and relatively amateurish) summary. When an idea is thought up more than once, it may very well be onto something.
The phrase, “the chicken and the egg,” is so hackneyed that it invokes its own abstract meaning: any cyclic, unending process with no beginning. If you like math, the limitless series, “…0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1….,” might come to mind. But, unless you’re a creationist, you probably think that the nature of chickens slowly changes over time; the modern-day chicken evolved from something that was decidedly not a chicken.
With this in mind, suppose that we had a hyper-specific definition of “chicken.” It doesn’t matter exactly what the definition is, but it would be based on genetic parameters. Then, using this definition, we could identify the first chicken. Let’s call this first chicken, “Marley.”
