Which came first - the Chicken or the Egg?

This question has been asked to me since I was a young boy. Indeed, as a graduate of philosophy, this has become one of the most perplexing, yet seemingly simple question. I recently watched a video of such in which the question is being creatively tackled again. The author of the video asserts that it is the egg who came first. He presented the question: how do we define the egg? Is it merely one laid by a chicken or an egg which contains a chicken.

Then he presented two sides of the spectrum, the first he called the Team Chicken, from the name, we can surmise that these team proposes that the chicken came first because an essential protein for the formation of  eggs, OV-17, is only found in the ovaries of a hen. So without a chicken, the author surmises, there would, technically, be no egg, hence chicken would come first.

Then he presented the question earlier stated in the first paragraph: how will egg be defined? And then he gave an example to illustrate the trickiness involved in such question, if an elephant lays an egg which hatches into a lion, how will the egg be called? Lion egg or elephant egg.

The author then proceeds to present the side of Team Egg. This team asserts that in the production of an egg, genetic information from both parents (in this case, the hen and the rooster), would contribute one half each of their genes to the new egg, in the process of development and with the influence of evolutionary forces such as environment and diet, tweeks on the developing embryo may happen that would then produce a slightly different organism. This would then lead to the appearance of a sort of a proto-chicken. This proto-chicken would then mate with another proto-chicken from which they will produce an egg, which, affected by small mutations as it develops then produces the chicken. So in this case, the egg came first.

The author concludes that regardless of how the egg is defined, whether it is a chicken egg or a proto-chicken egg, the egg would have come first.

This is my take. First of all, the definition of chicken egg. This is a semantic play of words. When we say chicken egg, the ordinary definition should, I believe, be one which must be taken into account. An ordinary definition is one which is understood and accepted by most people of a given language to be what it symbolizes for. When we say chicken egg, the ordinary definition, as understood by people of prudence and sound mind, is one laid by a chicken, NOT AN EGG WITH A CHICKEN. Otherwise, we could call it Ostrich egg for example.

On the question therefore as to how an elephant who lays an egg which hatches into a lion be called. Elephant egg or lion egg? Of course, for arguments sake, it is Elephant egg. Why? because at least in the English language, when the subject comes first before its description, the subject owns the description. That is the ordinary definition. Hence, most English language speakers would understand an elephant egg is one laid by an elephant, regardless of what it actually hatches into. We should not create confusion when none is. The principle of parsimony applies here.

An egg is a product of something, in philosophy, it is a potentiality. A potentiality is something that is still not an actuality. In other words, it has not yet reached its biologic potential in this case. An egg will always be a product of something. In the video, the development into a chicken could have been made by proto-chicken who laid eggs that mutated and gave rise to the chicken, which then laid the egg. The author suggests that since the chicken come from a proto-chicken that mutated, the egg came first.

However, although it is true that the chicken is a product, technically, by the mutation of the egg of proto-chicken, why then should we exclusively define chicken only as the mutated one. Isn't the proto-chicken a chicken also? So the chicken would still come first. There would have been no chicken if the proto-chicken did not mate in the first place. Although such proto-chicken did not produce the usual chicken, it does not mean that they are no longer classified as chicken.

Even by any stretch of the imagination, the egg will never come first because it is not an actuality. It has yet to achieve its potentials as a thing. It is like asking which came first, the mother or the baby. Even the new chicken which rose from the proto-chicken egg will still share many characteristics of its proto-chicken forebears until eventually, by evolutionary processes, it eventually branches out to a separate taxonomic classification. Even then, it will still belong to a larger grouping with its proto-chicken origins.

From a philosophical perspective, the chicken would still come first. An egg by its very definition is a potentiality produced by an actuality. The hen is the actuality. A potentiality is one which has not yet achieved its actuality. An actuality is one which has reached its biologic potentials. So strictly speaking, the chicken would still come first. Even if the mutation occurred after the egg was laid, the mutation would not still be possible if the egg was not laid in the first place and no chicken would exist if it was not hatched. In other words, the chicken, even though it is still a proto-chicken, is still a chicken and still would have come first.

So emphatically I would say that the chicken will come first. The chicken will come first because an egg, even if mutations will take place after it is laid, would still not have been technically possible itself if the chicken did not reach its potentials first. Even if the chicken reached its biologic potential for example, if it could not find a mate, then no egg would still be produced.