DiamondGooner wrote:Chicken and egg philosophy, considering you can't have one without the other where did it originate if you catch my drift
If the question is to be taken literally, it has a simple biological answer; Each chicken comes from an egg, and hard-shelled eggs have been created much earlier in the evolutionary process. Previous egg-laying animals (such as fish and lizards) evolved millions of years before the origin of the birds. The first chicken whose genes deviated enough from a previously established population to classify it as a new species was thus not born from parents who would themselves be identified as chicken.
However, because evolution is a continuous process, it is not customary to distinguish between two consecutive generations.
If the question specifically relates to the chicken egg, then the answer is also the egg. An animal almost identical to the modern chicken (a proto-chicken) laid a fertilized egg whose DNA was consistent with the modern chicken. This is a result of mutations in the mother's ovum (or egg cell) and the semen of the father.