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The chicken or the egg is a reference to the causality dilemma which arises from the expression "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". When used in reference to difficult problems, a chicken and egg problem is similar to a Catch 22 situation where something cannot happen until a second thing does, and the second thing cannot happen until the first does. For example, a person might have trouble finding a job without work experience, but to get work experience he/she must get a job.

The earliest reference to the dilemma is found in Plutarch's Moralia, in the books titled "Table Talk," in a series of arguments based on questions posed in a symposium. Under the section entitled, "Whether the hen or the egg came first," the discussion is introduced in such a way as to suggest that the origin of the dilemma was even older:

"...the problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world..."

Various answers have been formulated in response to the question, many of them humourous.

As suggested by the alternative definitions and solutions given below, the chicken-or-egg dilemma has multiple semantic variants and can thus be viewed as an exercise in semantics. Regarding each of these variants, the field of biology contains decisive contextual information. Although the problem has been around in one form or another for millennia, making it difficult or impossible to know who first "solved" it, the biological information required to resolve all of the obvious semantic variants has only been available for decades.

A modern analysis covering all of the major variants was authored by Christopher Langan, published in 2001 on the Mega Foundation website , and subsequently included in his book of essays . It appeared again in The Improper Hamptonian, was included in abbreviated form in a 2001 Long Island Newsday Q&A column featuring Langan, and was compactly summarized in Langan's 2001 Popular Science interview. Although others may previously have reached similar conclusions, this seems to have been the first time that a definitive analysis appeared in the popular media.

This analysis was recently corroborated in a May 26, 2006 CNN article, according to which the egg came first . The criteria on which CNN bases its answer, involving relatively modern findings from reproductive and evolutionary biology, are identical to those cited in the prior analysis.

Assuming a chicken egg

In this case, the egg is assumed to be a chicken's egg. This is an obvious assumption since the question itself implies a link between the two.

If one assumes the egg to be a chicken egg then one must define what a chicken egg is:

• If: A chicken egg will hatch a chicken

Then a bypass is allowed: An animal that was not a chicken laid the chicken egg which contained the first chicken. In this case the egg came first.

• If: A chicken egg is the egg that a chicken lays

Then a bypass is allowed: A chicken (that hatched from a non-chicken egg) laid an egg (a chicken egg). In this case the chicken came first.

• If: A chicken egg will hatch a chicken and A chicken egg is the egg that a chicken lays.

Then there may be an error of definition. If the definition of "chicken" used does not refer to "chicken eggs", then the chicken must come first, because without chickens there cannot be any chicken eggs.

Evolutionary chicken

In this case, the egg is not assumed to be a chicken egg. In effect this changes the question to: "Which came first, a chicken or any egg".

From a pseudo science point of view this question can be answered quite easily. The egg came first because any female sex cell is called an egg.

If the egg is defined structurally as the hard shelled thing, and the chicken a feather covered animal, the answer is still simple. Evolutionary scientists believe the first hard shell egg was the amniotic egg laid around 300 million years ago, and was laid by the animal who was the link between amphibians and reptiles. One of the first dinosaurs that we know had feathers was the Archaeopteryx, and came much later. Modern birds would not arise until 150 million years ago, descending from theropod dinosaurs.

In this case, the first chicken must have been the mutated offspring of a proto-chicken that laid the egg containing the first true chicken. In any case, this creature hatched from a recognizable egg. After all, the question is purposefully ambiguous -- it is not, "Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?"

The crux of the matter is how to biologically define 'a chicken'. What level of genetic similarity or structural similarity determine whether an organism is a chicken? One can only define what was the first chicken after the fact, thus any definition of the first chicken becomes arbitrary. The question 'which came first?' ignores the complicated reality of speciation.

According to the principles of speciation, neither the chicken nor the egg came first, because speciation does not occur in simple, obvious units. In fact, evolution is about a slow transition in an overall population. What qualifies as “chicken” (ignoring the many diverse modern types of chicken) involves a wide range of genetic traits (alleles) that are not encompassed in a single individual and continue to be modified from generation to generation.

The transition from non-chicken to chicken is a gray area in which several generations are involved, and therefore which includes many many chicken-and-egg events, with no one step representing the whole. Since the result of the process is an incomplete transition into various new characteristics rather than one single blueprint, a new species, "chicken", is only identified in hindsight when the species can be obviously identified as different from its ancestral stock.

Creationist chicken

The creationist counterpoint to the evolutionary viewpoint could be that the first chicken was made by the Creator, and then that first chicken laid the first egg. A similar resolution is possible under any other conditions where the first chicken arose from any means other than an egg. The dilemma remains, however, because it is equally plausible that the Creator began by creating the first chicken egg, from which the first chick subsequently hatched.

A question of whether chickens exist

It has been suggested that the definition of "chicken egg" could be "an egg that was laid by a chicken", creating a perpetual causal loop. An equally valid logical resolution to the problem is to assume that there are, in fact, no chickens.

A question of syntax

One can consider the question inside the framework of experience, making the question concrete instead of abstract: Which came first - the chicken or the egg? "The chicken" came first - in the sentence of the question. If the question is phrased differently, the answer is different.

Reframing the question

It could be said that the question simply requires one to know the context. Most people thinking of the question automatically think of the timeline and it is in this manner that both the previous evolutionary theory and religious teachings contexts arise. Other potential contexts are:

• Having looked through a dictionary from front to back, which came first? - the chicken or the egg?
• When you walked through the supermarket, which came first? - the chicken or the egg?
• When reading the menu, which came first? - the chicken or the egg?

See also

• Why did the chicken cross the road? (Problems with chickens beyond which came first)
• Catch-22 (logic)
• Bootstrapping, i.e., how to write a compiler for a previously uncompiled language using the language itself.
• Positive feedback

Other game theory related

• Prisoner's dilemma
• Chicken game

• Debates
• Paradoxes
• Logic