Chicken or The Egg - History of The Dilemma

History of The Dilemma

Ancient references to the dilemma are found in the writings of classical philosophers. Their writings indicate that the proposed problem was perplexing to them and was commonly discussed by others of their time as well.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was puzzled by the idea that there could be a first bird or egg and concluded that both the bird and egg must have always existed:

If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother – which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg.

The same he held good for all species, believing, with Plato, that everything before it appeared on earth had first its being in spirit."

Plutarch (46–126 ) referred to a hen rather than simply a bird. In volume 8 of the Moralia, in the books entitled Table-talk, Plutarch discussed a series of arguments based on questions posed in a symposium. Under the section entitled "Whether the hen or the egg came first", the discussion is introduced in such a way suggesting that the origin of the dilemma was even older:

...the problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble. And Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world..."

Macrobius (early 5th century), a Roman philosopher, found the problem to be interesting:

You jest about what you suppose to be a triviality, in asking whether the hen came first from an egg or the egg from a hen, but the point should be regarded as one of importance, one worthy of discussion, and careful discussion at that."

In System of Nature by Baron D'Holbach (1770, translated into English in 1797), he asks "was the animal anterior to the egg, or did the egg precede the animal?" (part 1, chapter 6).

Stephen Hawking and Christopher Langan argue that the egg came before the chicken, though the real importance of the question has faded since Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the accompanying Theory of Evolution, under which the egg must have come first, assuming the question intended usually the egg to mean an egg in general or an egg that statement hatches into a chicken.