Age Old Riddle Cracked: Egg comes first

[Rayne]

So, which is it, Chicken or the egg?

Here's a small snipit of the info:
source= http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/26/chicken.egg/

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to
have found an answer. It was the egg...

... Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the
University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was
clear.

The living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the
chicken it would develop into, he said.

"Therefore, the first living thing which we could say unequivocally was a
member of the species would be this first egg," he added. "So, I would
conclude that the egg came first."

The same conclusion was reached by his fellow "eggsperts" Professor David
Papineau, of King's College London, and poultry farmer Charles Bourns...

It appears that this was more of a nobrainer type question.
Of course an answer always seems more obvious when put into
perspective.

 

[Zeta]

Duh. I figured that out when I was 14.

 

[Murgatroyd]

I've known that the egg came first for about 20 years. Of course, my reasoning was based entirely on the fact that the question doesn't specify that the egg in question has to be a chicken egg.

 

[Joey]

I ditto the above, this is pretty duh for me. It comes off as an excuse to post a bunch of lame chicken related jokes.

 

[eX.A.K.R.]

I have always reasoned the egg came first (although, for a while, I believed the chicken came first). My reasoning was that, the creature that eventually evolved into the chickens we know today laid the egg that bore the chicken, hence the egg came first.

 

[The Big Al]

It had always depended on the definition of the egg for me. If it was a "chicken egg" then the chicken came first (because only chickens can lay chicken eggs). If it was just an egg then the egg came first because chickens had to come from somewhere.

Actually, considering the chicken we know today is man made (a group of species created through artifical selection) it should have never been a question consider a human would be there to see the first chicken emmerge from the egg.

 

[Kthleen]

I came up with Murgatroyd's answer, but discarded it because I felt the questioners were implying that it was a chicken egg.

Then it would depend on what was meant by chicken egg. The problem is that generally, what lays an egg and what comes out of it are the same type of creature. However, this question's answer would depend on what is meant by "chicken egg" in that it could be "egg that comes from a chicken" (in which case the chicken would have to come first) or "egg that hatches into a chicken" (in which case the egg would come first). It seemed that people often meant the latter, and that's what I chose, too.

Then it occured to me that this was probably a creation (God created chicken, which then layed egg) vs evolution (red junglefowl layed egg, which then hatched into chicken) question, and the answer depended on whether you were a creationist or not. But then the question for the creationist would be, "Wasn't the creature we know as Chicken created from an earlier animal? Or were there poodles on the ark?" So then, save for the "chicken egg=egg that comes from a chicken" argument, the answer was probably the egg anyway....