Debate: What Came First: Chicken or the Egg?

By Jake & Glenn 



We all know that chickens are the ancestors of the dinosaurs, and much like their Jurassic kin they lay eggs. There's a famous koan that asks, "what came first: the chicken or the egg?" From the moment the words escaped that Buddhist monk's lips the world has been completely puzzled by the answer. How do you get an egg without a chicken? How can there be a chicken with no egg? How do you get breakfast and dinner with no chicken or eggs? We're hoping to answer these questions or to reach nirvana, the state of total enlightenment, whichever comes first.

Jake: This is a question that I have meditated on many times since I converted to Buddhism in 2001. Sometimes I think it's the egg-- these are the times when I'm drunk and/or on PCP. It's the chicken: end of story. While the tale may be told, this debate is far from over-- in fact, it's just beginning. Without a chicken you can't get an egg, right? So how can you say an egg came before a chicken? You're trying to tell me you think a lizard or monkey laid an egg and out came a chicken? That's as ludicrous as a song about where your hos live. I find it more likely that God created the chicken at the same time he created man, but before he created woman. There's probably a missing book in The Bible about it, just like The Gospel of Infancy Thomas where Jesus kills some kids.

Glenn: Immediately Jake reveals the contradictions in his position and overall character. He claims to have converted to Buddhism, the most authentic religion available currently, in 2001. Yet at the same time he also invokes the Bible to justify his belief that god created a chicken before an egg. This sounds suspiciously like post-Mormon revisionism cloaked in a existential wonderland of despair. To look into the eyes of a chicken and tell it that it predates an egg is worse than looking into a child's eye (no matter which one) and telling it that Santa Claus is real. Both are lies that establish a culture of dishonesty in a world where the truth already hangs by a thin thread. An egg is a chicken in the purest and simplest form. Anyone who has studied evolution or pretends to study evolution at a major university knows that life began with the purest and simplest of forms before ultimately evolving into the chicken, which is the most complex living organism in the Western Hemisphere.

Jake: Glenn, you misspelled God, it is a capital "G." In your attempt to marginalize my lord and my life, you have fallen into my perfectly baited trap. If there's no God, then how can there be a chicken-- or even an egg, for that matter. If there was no God you wouldn't be sitting in an internet cafe drinking an Italian soda and pretending that God doesn't exist in an effort to relate to the late Kurt Cobain. You can be a Buddhist and believe in the Christian God at the same time. It's a religious Super Team-Up that eclipses the likes of Spider-Man and The Invisible Woman. I find your argument to be a bit scrambled, but I assume it has something to do with eggs. That pun was intended, just like your attempt to appeal to the atheist crowd.

Glenn: Let's not bring religion into this. Religion has killed enough people in the past 500 years and I don't want us to be added to that list. Instead I ask the focus to be returned to the egg. Remember how Mork (played brilliantly by Robin Williams) arrived on Earth during the first episode of Mork and Mindy? It was in an egg-shaped spaceship. No matter what religion you believe, it's hard to deny the alien origins of many of Earth's most famous landmarks: Stonehendge, Easter Island, the Space Needle. It follows that aliens likely brought the first egg to this planet. I can't tell you if they came in a spaceship and dropped the egg here to populate the planet with chickens nor can I tell you if they were all as funny as Robin Williams. I'm not that old! But I'm old enough to know that there was an egg around long before any chicken ever clucked its first cluck.

Jake: While Glenn might try to persuade you with flashy and farcical stories of spacemen coming to Earth via a giant egg, I will present you with nothing but cold facts. Fact: Chickens lay eggs. This is the most imortant fact of this debate. If you have no chicken to lay an egg, then you have no chicken to hatch from the egg. While some argue that the inverse is also true, I must laugh. That is as hilarious as the episode of Mork & Mindy where Mork gave birth to a giant egg and Jonathan Winters was his son. I don't pretend to know how an egg works, but I can make some guesses. I think an egg needs to be fertilized by a rooster. Maybe the chickens make love-- like I said, I'm clueless. What I'm going to propose to you now might seem a little far-fetched, even with all of this space talk: two chickens came before the egg. If you cannot process that I sincerely appologize. It's just the way it is, and whatever soft-boiled theories Glenn has about eggs are just plain rotten.

Glenn: You can use as many egg-related puns as you want, but the only people you will convince are Hare Krishnas and Neo-Nazis who mistakenly believe the Third Reich's Final Solution was "over easy." You say that two chickens must be the prerequisite for a successful egg. I do concede that in modern times that is one of the more reliable ways to produce an egg. However, this all begs the most important question of all: where did those two chickens come from and how did they fall in love? Chickens do not materialize out of thin air any more than humans do. Every chicken needs an origin story and every chicken begins with an egg. Every human has an origin story that also involves an egg. Eggs, in a slightly different form, reside in all female humans. If you turn your back on eggs it is as if you're turning your back on half of our population. As an avowed romantic and feminist, I love women in every form and would never betray them by betraying what resides in their fallopian tubes: a beautiful egg that will one day become a chicken.