Many riddles are really just trick questions. For example, if a plane crashes right on the border between two countries, where do you bury the survivors? You don’t bury the survivors. If a rooster lays an egg in the middle of a peaked roof, which way does the egg fall? Roosters don’t lay eggs. But what came first? The chicken or the egg? While this may seem like a question that just leads you in circles, it’s really one that can be answered by science.

Indulge me as I put on my nerd hat. Or rather, as I keep my nerd hat on. Let’s win a goat.

What Came First: The Chicken or the Egg?

Let me start with the easy and obvious answer: the egg. It’s the egg.

As it turns out, chickens aren’t the only animals to lay eggs. Mindblowing, I know. Fish lay eggs. Crocodiles and alligators lay eggs. Long before we had Popeyes or KFC, dinosaurs were laying eggs all across Pangaea. Most of us can probably agree that the stegosaurus and triceratops were around before your local chicken farm opened up shop. So, obviously, when you’re asking if the chicken or the egg came first, it’s the egg. By literally hundreds of millions of years.

Of course, when people ask the chicken or egg question, they’re talking about the kinds of eggs from which little baby chicks emerge. Even then, my answer stands: it’s the egg. If we can safely assume the fundamental principles of evolution, species can change or differ incrementally from generation to generation. We can also see bigger leaps with random mutation.

So, given this, let’s play this out in the context of a chicken and an egg. At some point along the way, we had some non-chicken creature. We would not call this animal a chicken. This animal lays an egg. From that egg, the world’s first chicken hatches. Maybe it was a spontaneous mutation. Maybe the animal that directly preceded the first chicken is almost like a chicken, but not quite. It’s not a chicken.

However, the egg that creature laid is technically a chicken egg, because a chicken came out of that egg. Thus, the egg came first. Thank you for reading my TED talk. 😉

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

While we’re at it, allow me to chime in on two more of these kinds of questions. You could say this question is a bit more philosophical in nature, but it really comes down to science again.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The answer to this riddle or question depends on how you define “sound.” If you define “sound” as the vibrations in the air, the tree falling in the forest definitely made a sound. The sound’s existence is dependent only on itself. When it hit the ground, it sent a wave through the air.

If you define “sound” as the perception of those vibrations, then the tree didn’t technically make a sound, because no one was around to “hear” it. The sound’s existence is dependent on someone hearing it. However, even if no human was around to hear it, the tree falling in the forest still makes a sound, because there must be other living creatures in the general vicinity. This is a forest, after all, and forests cannot exist without some animals. And animals can hear sounds just as well, if not better than humans.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

What’s the sound of one hand clapping? I’m with Bart on this one. Lisa, listen up! But if you publish a blog post about the chicken or egg question and no one reads it, did you even write it? If you have a delicious lunch or go on a glorious holiday and don’t post it on Instagram, did it even happen? Some mysteries we may never solve…