While explaining some silly things to my kids recently, I finally realized that the age old puzzle of which came first can be answered firmly. We just have to back out of the creationist thinking framework and consider decision framework.

Whether a creature is living or human is simply a predicate that can be evaluated when presented with the physical item. This seems a minimally required capability before one can ask the question.

Then therefore, there are at least two versions: genotypical chicken/egg or phenotypical chicken/egg. With my limited knowledge, I can imagine phenotypical chicken far before genotypical chicken. There seems to be a lot of other birds with eggs that look like chicken eggs. Genotypical egg most likely came to be due to sexual reproduction’s crossing-over stage mutation, or otherwise a spontaneous mutation shortly before or after the first division of the egg. Shortly around that time because the after that it becomes very unlikely for the organism to have enough cells of the “chicken cell”. So even now, it’s not a sure thing which happened first? A single cell of chicken egg or a multicellular chicken embryo.

However, considering sexual reproduction, even if there is a first genotypical chicken or egg, it is possible it’s child was not a genotypical chicken. It had to crossover with non-chicken cells. so if we look at the ancestry tree of chickens. We see spots of occupancies of genotypical chicken or egg, but they phase in and out of existence over many generations until there are enough genotypical chicken can sexually reproduce with each other.

Geneticist and biologist can probably give a better probability on which came first in this decision theoretic framework—was it a chicken egg or a multi-cellular chick embryo?

Ps I am really glad I can come up with this while answering my children’s questions. But I would love to have the reasoning skills to come up with this kind of thinking earlier in life. It’s not like I don’t know the biology. I just never put all the pieces together… Hope my kids can be smarter than me.