Which came first?

This is a Western-style Koan, meant to drive you out of your senses into cosmic consciousness; it rarely works.

Here's an answer proposed by Alan Watts: both at the same time. And here's a demonstration understood easily by children, but only after great resistance by adults. Take a continuous loop of string. Cut it in half. Which came first the beginning or the end?

truth
I don't think either the egg or the chicken came into existence all at once in the forms that they have now. They both evolved together from different forms to their present forms, in sync. The puzzle is a false one.

But from evolutions point of view the egg would have to come first, because each new mutation that constituted evolution would have been with the offspring, so each new change along the way was in the form of an egg, which grew into a slightly more evolved chicken. They couldn't have been in sync, it doesn't make sense.

M. Coates,
I suspect that we make an arbitrary decision on what a chicken is.
There are things that we can define as chickens but there is also a whole category of "chicken like birds". Quail, Grouse, Chukkar,Turkey etc.

If we as taxinomists define a chicken as a bird that mates successfully with other "chickens" that still is pretty arbitrary IMO.

So there probably was never a "Prime Chicken" except as humans should choose to define one. Implicit in this is that there probably never was a "Prime Egg" either except by definition. And the definition is purely a human construction. Nature has little regard for human definitions.

There is a similar problem with First Humans, Universes, and first causes. Simply because we choose to define a Universe, a God, or a "soul" has very little bearing on what one actually is except by human conventions or definitions.

My new opinion is exactly the same as yours.

Or we could all adopt the Platonian doctrine that everything exists because we think it does. My thoughts of a poor motherless chick within an egg is just too tragic, so I will think of a chicken first.

Why isn't there an "all of the above" choice? I think all are true with the addition of Foxfyres idea.

God created chickens and eggs through evolution when I thought of them.

You've all fallen into the intellectual trap. The only answer is they both came at the same time.

It's like the story of the two zen buddhist monks arguing over a waving flag. The first says, "the wind is moving the flag." The second says, "the flag is waving the air." A third monk overhears them and says, "You're both wrong. The mind moves the flag and the air."

And so I wonder, why does this poll have percentage points? Clearly it means I have answered it before, but




I don't think it did that.
Did I?
did I pick the chicken?



Does the Shadow know?

Egg first. Eggs were far before a chicken.

but,

dolce far niente...

uovo far gallina..

So they say.