CNN reports from London, England:

It's a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

The geneticist John Brookfield argued that the organism inside the egg would have had the same genetic material as the chicken that would eventually hatch from it.

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

The philosopher David Papineau also believes that the first chicken came from an egg, proving that chicken eggs existed before chickens.

I would argue it is a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it.... If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg.

Semantics? Both Brookfield and Papineau make the mistake of assuming there was either a first chicken or a first chicken egg, rather than acknowledging that there were generations of proto-chicken ancestors in populations that genetically morphed into today's chickens. The age-old question presents a false dichotomy. It's the chairman of the Great British Chicken trade, Mr. Bourns, who almost gets it right.

Eggs were around long before the first chicken arrived. Of course, they may not have been chicken eggs as we see them today, but they were eggs

Yes, there were eggs before chickens. But no first chicken egg and no first chicken. Just fowl and eggs becoming more "chickeny" over many generations until today, with a clearly identifiable species made up of genetical similar birds, when we can fairly easily discriminate individual chickens from nonchickens.

CNN.com - Chicken and?egg?debate unscrambled - May 26, 2006

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