The egg came before the chicken
It's a pretty popular conundrum - which came first, the chicken or the egg? Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle asked the question -
If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother – which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.
Of course, no one had a clue about evolution by natural selection at the time, and this post does require a basic understanding about it. If you're a creationist, I'd recommend you ignore this post.
The egg came first - the easy way out
The first explanation is a bit of a cheat really, but a valid answer anyway. Birds diverged from theropod dinosaurs around 150 million years ago. However, eggs resembling the modern avian egg were around hundreds of millions of years before that. Indeed, most smaller-sized dinosaur eggs would closely resemble a chicken egg.
The egg still came first
Of course, we need to redefine the problem. Which came first - a chicken or a chicken egg? Now, that's more challenging!
The simplification would be - a proto-chicken species laid an egg which led to the first chicken. Of course, that's not literally possible. No one mutation or series of mutations over a single generation can ever lead to a new species. Species evolve over multiple generations, there's no overnight shift from proto-chicken to chicken. However, from very teeny human perspectives, we don't need to be so precise.
Chicken evolved to its current domesticated sub-species (gallus gallus domesticus) from red junglefowl (gallus gallus) somewhere between 5000 BC and 2000 BC. Again, while there was no single red junglefowl that laid the first chicken egg, taking a wider view the concept does make sense.
Then there's the question of whether the egg was a red junglefowl egg or a chicken egg, irrespective of whether a chicken hatched from it? Either way, it doesn't matter, the egg came first!
So there you go - the egg always comes before the chicken!
Sources:
http://www.causality.inf.ethz.ch/cause-effect.php
https://books.google.com/books?id=tNkGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA202#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/fyi-which-came-first-chicken-or-egg
http://www.ucalgary.ca/news/utoday/april19-2013/dinosaur-egg-study-supports-evolutionary-link
https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/uoc-des041813.php
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-domestication-history-of-chickens-170653
Yup, pretty much :) I think some people took his statement literally - obviously it is impossible for a single bird not a chicken to have laid a chicken egg hatching to be a chicken. But he's of course correct from a wider perspective.
I was about to answer "the dinosaurs' before reading the post (only from the title), but you actually already covered that :D Nice!
It's a bit of a smartass answer, but I had to cover it anyway :)
The first self-replicating biopolymer came first! :D
Fascinating topic and always worthwhile to dwell on.
That's another can of worms :)
It's one entity eggchicken which keeps on cloning itself ?)
Gave you the up-vote but according to expanded evolution. The egg came first. The egg being a single cell organism, which except for species like the amoeba with asexual reproduction, which is itself a fertilized egg. An egg is a single cell organism which grows.into a chicken eventually, or a human. I am a creationist that realizes things evolve. My creationism is derived from what I perceive to be the fact that we live in God's zoo. Every so often the aliens stop by the earth and grab some DNA or some life forms and cart them away to another planet. Can I prove that? No, but it is a fun way to think about the realities of what I have observed and I really liked your post and think you are right. Then again, a chicken could have been produced in which case we would both be wrong.
I don't think you are a creationist in the traditional sense. Maybe it's "theistic evolution" or "progressive creationism".
As for chicken, there's clear evidence they evolved from red junglefowl. So they were certainly not "produced".
Well, that's what some think but...I will tell you something that happened here on my farm one year when I planted some corn. For whatever reason, instead of being green, the corn plants were purple. I called it purple striated corn. Also, the corn looked like huge crabgrass with many stalks out of one root. I wanted to see what happened with it but some antelope ate it. But like from one seed, ten to fifteen stalks? What if they had all produced the regular two to three ears and they were normal sized ears? WOW!
Well, I don't have an explanation for that, but I'm sure someone will :)
I do know about factors that could have caused it but they are all gone and hopefully stay gone. I noted some of them is the Song of Angels Books, so...someone said it was a virus but, other corn grew fine. So who knows
Up voted and now following.
When I was a student of marine biology long time ago.. long long long time ago my biology professor asked the same question. She didn't expect an answer, so I bravely said, well the egg was first because dinosaurs laid eggs and dinosaurs are way older than chickens. I was a class hero for a while after that. As conundrums go, chicken-egg conundrum is not that brain melting as it seems to the "uneducated" one :)
Bitcoin came first, then the internet
God came before the chicken and the egg.