Just about everyone has heard the proverbial question, “What came first the chicken or the egg?” Evolutionists usually answer, “It was the egg.” This is because of their presupposition of the simple evolving into the more complex. Creationists often say, “It was the chicken.” This is because the Bible says all of the flying animals were created by God in the beginning on Day Five of the creation. In the past I have always answered the question in that manner (chicken first). But recently I have come to another conclusion about the correct answer to this age-old question.
When the chicken came to be it had to have had unfertilized eggs inside it or else there would have been no more chickens. The other thing we can say is there had to be at least one rooster around capable of fertilizing the eggs. With these facts in mind, I think the correct answer to the question is “both the chicken and the eggs came first.”
Complex Chicken Reproduction System
If a process of adaptation took place to get the chickens of today, whether the process was external (according to Darwin’s natural selection), or internal (according to God’s programming), the egg had to adapt right along with the chicken. There could be no time separation of the egg vs. the chicken adaptation.
Have chickens adapted from the fowl that stepped (or flew) off Noah’s ark? Have you noticed that chickens are not mentioned in the Old Testament? That fact matches current scientific studies that indicate that domesticated chickens (subspecies Gallus gallus domesticus) did not adapt to have their identifiable traits until relatively recently. Using fossil and genetic evidence a 2020 study concluded that the domestic chicken did not develop as early as previously assumed. Instead, these researchers concluded that the jungle fowl subspecies Gallus gallus spaedicus was the ancestor of living chickens and that these domesticated chickens did not appear until some 3000 years ago, using secular time assumptions.*
The fossil evidence that indicated to the researchers that the chicken was more recent was found in northern China and Pakistan.
So if this is true, then the chicken didn’t come first with its egg at all, but instead came later as a subspecies of a jungle fowl. I guess we could still say that the “chicken kind” and its eggs came first, but that sounds pretty lame and likely won’t become a future iconic saying.
J.D. Mitchell
*Source: Gibbons, Ann, “How the wild jungle fowl became the chicken,” science.org, June 6, 2022.
