The age-old question, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Young child logic says that, of course, a chicken hatches from an egg, so the chicken must come first. Then you just say, what laid the egg, and their mind is blown….

As a Christian I was taught that God created animals, not eggs, so then I figured the Chicken came first.

What do you think?

Now the key to this question is chicken. If the question was a chicken-like bird the answer might be different.

Let’s look back at Genesis:

Genesis 6:19-20(NASB)

And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every kind will come to you to keep them alive.

Did you ever stop to think what kind means?

Most Christian scientists would roughly translate it as any animal that can breed together and the offspring isn’t sterile. For example, all horses can interbreed so they are one type. However, a horse and donkey can interbreed but the offspring cannot, so they would likely be different types.

On the ark there would not have been lions, tigers, cheetahs, bobcats, house cats…. They can all interbreed, so they are one type, and only the one type representative would have been brought on. After they left the ark, then they would gradually separate into all of the breeds we have today.

The same with wolves, coyotes, and all of the dog breeds, etc.

If you go to the Ark exhibit in Kentucky, you will see they use types that are similar to a combination of what we see today.

So back to our question. Chickens, Turkeys, and other small birds can all interbreed, so are of one type. Therefore, likely there was one progenitor species that represented all of these types on the ark.

Chickens are one animal that creationist scientists have investigated. They reviewed biblical words for chickens and birds, and studied which modern birds can interbreed with chickens and reviewed others with similar physical traits. They believe these birds were among the clean animals on the Ark and as they diversified and filled the earth post-Flood, they grew into many species of birds. The earliest fossils of post-flood birds are more like pheasants.

Specialization that lead to chickens came later. Therefore, sometime later a not-quite chicken mom and a not-quite chicken dad have a baby egg… that contained what we would recognize today as a chicken.
Later those chickens specialized into all of the types of Chickens we have today…

With current Biblical understanding of types, we have to answer that the egg came first…

Sources:

https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg/
https://arkencounter.com/