The Ultimate Solution to the “Chicken and Egg” Problem

Which came first: the chicken or the egg? This question has puzzled philosophers and normal people for ages. Most believe that it doesn’t have an answer, and use it as an example of a paradox or a conundrum, or, worse yet, a metaphor for something that is unanswerable, never-ending, or hopelessly cyclical. But is this question truly unanswerable?

Let’s examine it closer. Although it is rarely stated explicitly, the problem is based on two implicit premises: a) Every chicken comes out of an egg, and b) Every egg comes out of a chicken. Using these premises and nothing else, neither answer can be logically true, because it must be preceded by another, i.e. the chicken can’t come first because there must be a preceding egg from which it came, and the egg can’t come first because there must be a preceding chicken from which it came. Houston, we have a problem!

Fortunately, math (or computer science) can illuminate the source of this apparent paradox. In programming terms this problem is nothing more than a simple recursive function, which defines a series a(n) of “chicken” and “egg” elements, as follows (written in pseudo-code):

IF a(n)=”chicken” THEN a(n+1)=”egg” ELSE a(n+1)=”chicken”;

What would happen if we run this code on a computer? In theory it will run forever and will never stop. In practice, the program will crash after exhausting its memory stack (which could take as long as a millisecond). Why? Any computer scientist or a mathematician will tell you right away that the recursion is ill-defined. A proper definition of any recursive function MUST include the base case (aka terminating condition), or a(0), which, of course, would be the answer to the question itself. So, this problem isn’t a perfect metaphor for something unanswerable after all, but rather an example of something that is purposefully ill-defined, and, as such, doesn’t deserve an answer at all, until the definition is complete, at which point the answer becomes trivial.

All right, so how do we determine the correct base case? Well, math can tell us that too — in the abstract, the base case is… totally arbitrary. In other words, we are free to choose either option and declare it to be true. Of course, for the sake of decency we should at least try to justify it, however whimsically. Here are a few possibilities:

1. The chicken came first because God created all the birds (including the chicken) from nothing, not from any eggs. This, of course, assumes the validity of the biblical Creation myth.

2. The egg came first, because dinosaurs laid eggs long before the chicken even existed. This uses an unjustified assumption that the word “egg” can be redefined more broadly.

3. The chicken comes before the egg… in the dictionary. This assumes that the alphabetical order is meaningful in this context.

4. The egg came first, because the entire Universe came out of a World Egg (a motif common to many ancient religions, such as the Chinese Tao myth about Pangu).

5. And finally, neither came first, because the Universe and everything in it, including the chicken, has always been, so there was no beginning and the question has no answer. This idea is consistent with the Static Universe theory, common even among scientists until the mid 20th century.

Is that it? Is the answer simply whatever we want it to be (or not to be)? It would be disappointing if that was the case, right? After all, we want to find out the REAL answer, based on the real world, at least the world according to modern science, which says that the Universe certainly had a beginning and the chicken did not come out of nothing.

To answer the real-world question, we should first ask another one. Why does this paradox exist in the real world at all? Because the basic premises of the problem are wrong or rather not 100% accurate. This might seem strange at first, but as we know from the evolutionary theory, life isn’t static, but slowly and gradually evolves, from one generation to the next. Each subsequent generation of a given species is a copy of the previous one. In particular, each chicken is a copy of its parents. But this copy is not absolutely accurate — the copying process produces slight errors (aka mutations). In other words, a chicken lays a chicken egg, which is slightly different from the egg from which this chicken came. The difference is too small to detect without some pretty advanced equipment, but those errors accumulate over multiple generations, and if we compare two chickens separated by, let’s say, a thousand generations, we may be able to see the difference even with the naked eye. Of course, the change is so gradual that it may seem impossible to tell the difference between a chicken and its ancestral “pre-chicken” species (which probably wasn’t that much different from a chicken). One may argue that there is no clear boundary between these two species, so there was never a first chicken or a first chicken egg (or a first egg of any species for that matter). But that’s not really the case.

Let’s run a thought experiment to find the very first chicken. The most widely accepted definition of a species is based on reproductive ability. If two animals, a male and a female, can produce a viable and non-sterile offspring, then these two animals belong to the same species. We do know that all the chickens alive today are definitely chickens, because that’s what we decided while classifying present-day species. Let’s assume that we can do anything we can imagine. Then we can resurrect all the ancestors of present-day chickens that have lived during the last, say, 10 million years. Now we pair up every resurrected bird with every present-day chicken of the opposite sex and see what happens. If a given resurrected bird produces a fully viable offspring with at least one present-day chicken, then it’s a chicken too, otherwise it’s a member of some pre-chicken species. Since the number of such birds is finite, eventually we will find the oldest bird that is determined to be a chicken by this “experiment”. That will be the very first true chicken that has ever lived. Of course, this “experiment” relies on many arbitrary or even random definitions and parameters, so if we repeat this experiment tomorrow we may well get a different result. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we will always find the first chicken, whoever that might be. But wait, didn’t this first chicken come from a chicken egg? Yes, obviously, the chicken’s genome is identical to the genome it had inside the egg, because it’s the same organism. The last infinitesimal mutation that crossed the imaginary line between a chicken and a pre-chicken occurred inside the pre-chicken before the egg was formed, so the resulting egg was already a chicken egg, even though it was laid by a pre-chicken.

So, there you have it — the completely scientific, real-world answer to the age-old question of whether the chicken came first or the egg.

It was the egg! Who laid that egg? It was an immediate ancestor of the chicken, which wasn’t a chicken yet.

You may wonder why all this is even important. Well, let’s take a real-life conundrum. I want to open my own business, and a big one, with millions and millions in revenues, so that it will make me rich. But to create a big business I need a lot of startup money first. In other words, to become rich in this way I have to be rich already. Looks like a classical “chicken and egg” problem, with money being the chicken and business being the egg (or vice versa, doesn’t matter). So, should I give up on my dream because it’s clearly impossible? No, because not only do I know that such “unsolvable” problem has a solution, but the preceding argument also shows all the possible solutions to it. I can go “biblical” and appeal to a higher power to create a chicken for me. In this case — find a rich investor to give me startup money. Or, I can try the way of the Tao and start from an egg — join an existing big company as an employee or a junior partner and work my way to the top. Or, I can use the principles of evolution — start a very small business, which doesn’t require a significant startup capital, get small revenues, reinvest those into growing the business, and repeat this process until I get what I wanted, much like the real chicken that slowly evolved from a single cell amoeba-like ancestor. In business terminology, such a process is called “bootstrapping”. But most important of all, knowing the answer to an “unsolvable” question gives you a perfect excuse not to give up on your dreams in the face of naysayers, who are not even capable of answering such a simple question as which came first — the chicken or the egg?