Wait…did the chicken come first or did the egg? I don’t know! I’ve heard people throw this question around when they want to appear philosophical, with a book awkwardly folded in their pocket, a matcha in one hand, and a cardigan thrown over their shoulders (performative). But really, what came first?
According to evolutionary science, the egg actually came first. Long before there were chickens as we know them, bird-like ancestors were laying eggs. Over generations, tiny genetic changes accumulated, and at some point, one of these eggs hatched the first creature we could call a “modern chicken.” So technically, the egg existed before the chicken, but the chicken was born from it. Evolution quietly did its thing, and the drama of firsts was over before we even noticed. In the end, the question of “which came first” is really just a story about small changes adding up over time.
But really, why does it matter that we now know? Why do we keep asking the same question over and over, clinging to the need for a beginning? Why do we hold onto this one puzzle so tightly? Of course, if you’re a scientist trying to untangle the mysteries of evolution, go right ahead, but if you’re a high schooler reading this, why should it matter to you? Does everything really need to start somewhere? Perhaps the problem isn’t the chicken or the egg at all. Perhaps it’s our brains, wired to demand origins, to make sense of loops we can never fully untangle.
The human obsession with beginnings is astonishing. We instinctively seek starting points, precedents, and foundations to anchor our thoughts, our actions, our creations, as if without them the world would collapse into chaos. When faced with a task that demands creativity or understanding, we search for examples, patterns, and rules, as though one spark from the past can ignite the future. But why do we demand a beginning? Why must everything have an origin? Time unfolds without pause, yet we imagine it as a line with a first moment. Perhaps the need for origins is not in reality but in the architecture of consciousness, a mechanism to make continuity comprehensible, to impose structure on processes that have no edges. Every cause is preceded by another, every effect feeds into another, and yet we strain to find the first link in an endless chain. Before the first egg, what existed? Before life, before consciousness, before time, was there a before? Perhaps beginnings do not exist, and the search for them is an attempt to confine infinity, to grasp that which cannot be grasped. The question itself, the act of seeking a start, may be the only thing that truly exists, and all else emerges as a consequence of our minds trying to trace the untraceable.
Perhaps neither the chicken nor the egg ever existed. Perhaps what came first was the question itself, and all else is only our attempt to answer it.
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