Chicken or Egg?

David Cowles
Jan 30, 2025
So the answer to “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is neither.
You’ve been around long enough to have confronted the ‘Chicken or Egg’ paradox countless times. We know, or think we know, that you can’t have an egg without a chicken to lay it; likewise you can’t have a chicken without an egg for it to hatch from.
So what’s the solution? Thanks to modern biology, we now know that the chicken and the egg are one organism, like a caterpillar/butterfly, at different stages of development. That organism is the result of a single cell reproducing and differentiating.
That single celled organism (call it chicken or egg) evolved from a cell of a different, but related, species that accumulated enough ‘damage’ to its code to become a new species. So the answer to “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” is neither; what came first was a cell of another species, modified until it came to head a new species (chicken/egg).
Of course, this process of evolution will give rise to numerous other species that will have gone extinct in the interim. But this explanation actually resolves nothing; it merely pushes the problem back from the origin of chicken to the origin of living organisms on Earth.
Furthermore, we are only able to solve this riddle by adopting a ‘God’s eye’ view of the entire process: we presumably have all the relevant facts, we are unencumbered by any preconception or prejudice, and we are fundamentally unaffected by the outcome. This is not necessarily the Judeo-Christian model of God but it is familiar nonetheless.
How about the other organisms involved in this process? There is no prima facie reason to assume that these organisms either have or lack the ability to step outside the immediate problematic and view the entire process from end to end (God’s eye).
In If Nietzsche were a Narwhal, author Justine Gregg argues for a new version of human exceptionalism: human beings have this ability to abstract, other life forms do not. I will grant you, it takes a lot to imagine a bacterium or a fern ruminating on the matter of its own mortality, or about the fate of the universe. And yet…
On the other hand, plants especially exhibit behavior that we recognize as highly ‘moral’; does that mean that non-human life forms have an ethics, if not a cosmology?
Let’s apply this to the chicken-egg problem. According to Gregg, the adult chicken has no sense that it began life as an egg, no more than a human baby knows it was once a fetus. However, it presumably lacks the human’s ability to deduce its ontology. To Gregg’s chicken, its time as an egg is the unknown, undifferentiated ‘past’ out of which all things come to be.
Many modern philosophers would challenge Gregg’s model of non-human intelligence; they would not accept Gregg’s proposed limitations without more evidence. But what if the difference between human and non-human intelligence is merely one of degree rather than kind?
We have only recently discovered our ontological past in fetal tissue. Before then, we had little more sense than animals do re our origins. What if we have a pre-fetal backstory that functions as an undifferentiated past for us in the same way that the fetal past is a black box to a chicken?
What if the universe is ultimately just as unknowable by human intelligence as it is by a lowly sponge? Imagine how a chicken understands its place in the great chain of being; now imagine that that’s functionally equivalent to how you understand your place in that same totality.
Dogs and cats know the score. They are part of the family. To hear them tell it, they head their families. Every day, they go for a walk in the morning, then enjoy breakfast with the other family members. Then they go off to work or school, wherever it is they go; but no worries because they almost always return, in order, after a roughly uniform period of time.
Life is good, and we get it…most of the time. But what does your pet make of a 2 week stay in a kennel while the rest of the family is skiing in Switzerland? Or your recent move from Maine to Arizona? Or the sudden, unexplained absence of a beloved family member?
Other than as a vague, emotive background, it is hard to see how they fit these ‘catastrophes’ into their world view. And yet, I don’t see dogs leaping off rooftops or attending prayer services. I never met a dog wearing a sign that read, “Life’s Absurd!”
To be, in any capacity, is to tolerate a massive amount of cognitive dissonance. ‘Consciousness philosophers’ talk of a Global Workspace where spacetime is suspended and all data points are simultaneously accessible (like RAM in your computer).
It is reasonable to assume that all conscious entities, like dogs, cats, and people, have a Global Workspace, the details of which are species specific. Same goes for ravens, octopus, bonobos and bacteria, if these are indeed conscious.
Bottom line, all conscious entities are aware, to some extent, of their ontogenesis, but none is aware in its entirety. The limits of that awareness constitute ‘cognitive dissonance’ (original sin?) for each particular species. In the end, all conscious entities exist in the perpetual superposition of egg and chicken.
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