The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg

Usually choanoflagellates are considered the nearest non-animal protist to animals. These guys aren't so far off, and maybe shared an ancestor capable of multicellularity, but they're probably not ancestors of animals. So my non-expert guess is that this pattern of embryo-like division is convergent. If not, the evolutionary tree is about to get shuffled big time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanozoa and the containing group, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holozoa

Edit: folks, there actually is some interesting science here if you can avoid getting hung up on the silly title.

Nice read. Anyways ...

Hindu Mythology: Universe emerged from a "cosmic egg" (Brahmanda).

Greek Mythology: Orphic tradition describes a universe hatching from an egg.

Chinese Mythology: Pangu broke out of a cosmic egg, creating heavens and earth.

Big Bang Theory: Universe began from a dense, hot "singularity," conceptually like a cosmic egg.

Symbolic Parallel: Egg symbolizes unity and potential, akin to the universe's origin.

What's a chicken?

First came the reptiles, then the chicken. Eggs are hundreds of millions of years older than chicken.

Here is a (professional) philosophical perspective on the problem, with an interesting discussion in the comments http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/02/egg-came-first....

As others have pointed out, this is not the right question to ask now that we know about Darwinian evolution through natural selection.

This is a reminder, however, that the questions we ask are very powerful framing devices that can constrain or liberate our thinking.

Wait, people actually debate this?

As per theory of evolution, current species were created from ancestor species. Since chicken's ancestor species obviously laid eggs. It stands to reason that first chicken came from chicken egg which came from non-chicken!

So, egg came first.

Update: fixed typo

Well I'm glad we've put this age old question to bed

A cheeken laid the egg with the first chicken in it.

There were eggs long before there were anything like a bird or a chicken.

But if you're on the strict interpretation, the change was so gradual over so many generations it's hard if not impossible to detect. Even when it speciates (becomes unable to produce viable offspring after mating) is hard to tell. There was like likely a long stretch of many generations where sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

TL:DR; How long is a piece of string?

edit: Variation of the same question: Were there radio waves before there radios? Jupiter and thunderstorms produce them, but we had no way of knowing so to us they did not exist.

It’s chicken because if you use evolution, an animal will evolve to have egg so that “chicken” must have been there first to evolve to be able to lay eggs. Took me 5 min to figure the biggest question mankind had to offer.

Both - a chicken with a lifetime of eggs. God created the first female chickens with eggs.