proto chicken

Bro chickens are already loaded with protein, what are you doing?

I don't think It's that clear, are eggs named by what created them, or what they contain? I could certainly see an argument that the first chicken hatched from a proto-chicken egg

But is it a chicken egg because it hatches into a chicken or because it is laid by a chicken?

It depends on which egg and which chicken you mean exactly.

I feel like this kinda answer just shows you haven't really thought about the problem in depth.

TIL the first chicken egg wasn't laid by a chicken

Yeah but like where did that chicken come from

This is the best argument I've heard yet.

Someone could argue that the egg isn't part of the animal, the "egg stage" just applies to when the animals was growing in the egg. But it's a pretty difficult argument to make.

Depends on your definition of "chicken egg". Language is defined by the way people use it and nobody (other than perhaps a few people in this thread) has ever bothered defining what a chiclen egg is: Is it an egg laid by a chicken or is it an egg that contains a chicken

When you go to the supermarket you call that a chicken egg because it was laid by a chicken, even if the egg is incapable of ever containing a chicken (at least from what I know you can't grow chickens from supermarket eggs) So arguably that means eggs laid by chickens are chicken eggs. But nobody has ever had to define whether an egg containing a chicken is also a chicken egg, even if the egg was not laid by a chicken. So if you don't define an egg laid by a proto-chicken to be a chicken egg then you would say that the chicken came before the egg.

It's really a question of creationism vs evolution... God would've created the chicken first

That depends on semantics.

Is a chicken egg an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that hatches a chicken?

The answer to that question changes the answer to the original question

The rooster came on both.

Some non-egg laying animal gave birth to an egg laying animal due to a beneficial mutation. So the "chicken" (or rather, any egg laying animal) came first.

eggish

You cannot have a chicken without a chicken egg. And the egg comes first.

It's the paradox of the heap

At some point the pre-chicken will lay a chicken egg and a chicken will be born

If a chicken egg is an egg that hatches into a chicken, then unfertilized chicken eggs would not be chicken eggs. But if you took an alligator egg and transplanted a developing chicken embryo into it, that would become a chicken egg.
You'd get the heuristic "All chickens have hatched from chicken eggs", which sounds pretty elegant.

If a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then you couldn't reliably say that a chicken egg hatches into a chicken - the heuristic from before would become "Not all chickens have hatched from chicken eggs". And that one, while it feels a bit imprecise, might be closer to what we observe in reality, especially with that Proto-chicken argument. So the Proto-chicken would have laid a Proto-chicken egg, which hatched into a chicken, which laid chicken eggs.
And it would work with the current scientific hijinks like hatching chickens from different eggs or straight from test tubes.

If I say "my penis", it is likelier that I am talking about the one attached to me rather than the one I bought in the market.

I will opt for the Minecraft spawn egg logic. The chicken spawn egg was first.

What came first, the oak tree or the acorn?

In that case the chicken came first, regardless of how we define "chicken", we can reuse that definition for the first "chicken egg" it laid.

Idk who the ten people that upvoted this are but godamnit

Edit: if you can see these edits, and how much I can't handle sentence structure, and you are god, and not an egg, pls forgive me

And there is evolution to take note of too. The chickens that were alive back then could look very different to the chickens we have today. We say the word "chicken", and we think of the chickens that you see at farms, or sometimes in the wild, with no thought at all to the details. True, one could argue that chickens have not undergone any evolution, and were as they are today, but there are several flaws in that reasoning. First, every animal has been a certain way, but, as time passes and their environment changes, they must change as well. Here's an example of natural selection, for those who are not as well versed in the matter of evolution.

Say there are white squirrels. They have lived there for hundreds of years, and therefore adapted to accommodate the forest. One day, a paper mill is built next to the forest where they reside, and spews pollution out. Over time, the trees of the forest, once elm white, are not soot black. The white squirrels are then hunted because they can no longer blend in with their environment. Soon, black squirrels are born. They can now blend in with the trees, and are killed less often. The white squirrels are hunted until there is no more left.

See also Sorites paradox / paradox of the heap

They had two dads you bigot.

This is species appropriation and I'll poison you with my beak so fucking fast dude