> What's a chicken?

Well I think the original saying could be expanded to something like "Given that chicken birds hatch from chicken eggs, and chicken eggs are layed by chicken birds, how did the cycle get started?"

Or in the case of the article "Given that all egg-layers hatch from eggs and that all eggs are layed by egg-layers how did the cycle get started?"

To answer the former question, we know that a bird can lay mutated eggs, but an egg can hatch into a mutated bird. So a not-quite-chicken layed a chicken egg.

The article deals with the second question.

Returning to your question I guess the answer you are looking for is a watchmaker God? And that if then we continue the analogy the purpose of the universe is to develop into another God?