Which got here first, the hen or the egg? The hen, no, the egg, no, the hen, no, the egg. It is sufficient to make your head spin proper off your neck.
Spoiler: The egg got here first! However how?
We have all been by way of the logic; most of us find yourself on the identical place. As Luna Lovegood, the quirky witch from Harry Potter, put it when requested the riddle, “A circle has no starting.” And certainly, trying to establish the reply to this basic causality dilemma is an train in utter futility. For many who do not have a pat story involving a divine being who seems completely fashioned species, it is a no-win scenario.
Causality Dilemma
A causality dilemma is extra generally often known as the hen or the egg paradox! It characterizes conditions during which it’s difficult to find out between the reason for an occasion and the impact.
Even the Greek-Roman thinker Plutarch could not precisely give you an answer. He went with the decidedly non-answer reply that the egg was first as “it begets and incorporates all the things” … and likewise that the hen was first as a result of, to start with, creation was “vigorous and ideal” and “self-sufficient and whole.”
However that does not cease us from asking. Fortunately for individuals saved awake at evening by such quandaries, NPR’s Robert Krulwich bought to the underside of the dilemma when he, fortunately, stumbled throughout the video under.
Mainly, many, many moons in the past, there was a chicken-like fowl. It was genetically near a hen however wasn’t a full-blown hen but. The video calls it a proto-chicken. So proto-hen laid an egg, and proto-rooster fertilized it. However when the genes from mother and pop almost-chicken fused, they mixed in a brand new method, making a mutation that by chance made the infant completely different from its mother and father.
Though it will take millennia for the distinction to be observed, that egg was completely different sufficient to change into the official progenitor of a brand new species, now often known as … the hen!
So, in a nutshell (or an eggshell, if you’ll), two birds that weren’t actually chickens created a hen egg, and therefore, we now have a solution: The egg got here first, after which it hatched a hen.
Possibly the query we should always actually be asking is: Which got here first, the proto-chicken or the proto-chicken egg?