The chicken vs egg question has never been about chronology or science.
It’s been about religion vs science.
Science says the egg came first: something nearly imperceptibly not quite a chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken. That’s how evolution works, with the egg coming first.
Religion says a god poofed a chicken into existence. The chicken came first, and only ever laid pure chicken eggs. The eggs will forever hatch a chicken and nothing but a chicken.
That’s the chicken vs egg thing. It’s not a puzzle at all, it’s just science vs religion.
e: simplified. I’m too wordy by default.
I think there are two valid scientific/philosophical answers without taking religion into it, based on one question:
Are we specifically talking a chicken egg, or the concept of an egg?
In the former case, eggshells contain compounds that cannot exist in nature, and must come from a creature. a chicken egg cannot exist without a chicken before it, thus the chicken came first.
In the latter case, various evolutionary splits happened between animals evolving egg developing capability and some animals evolving into chickens. From this we can say that the egg came before the chicken.
Worst case, this solved exactly nothing. Best case, it can be an exercise in reasoning.
At which point does an egg of non-chicken become an egg of chicken?
Chickenness is a spectrum, not a binary
Is archeopteryx a chicken?
If I say no, are you going to pick the next most recent named ancestor of the chicken, and keep repeating until someone says yes?
Maybe
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The compression artifacts (from converting B/W line art to jpg) being printed on the page have given me a new pet peeve
Now imagine these corrupted images being engraved into stone or steel by machine. Turned into literal artifacts for future generations to ponder over.
