Tongue test, tried and true. I prefer the teeth tap personally, more efficient.
As a child I was really into dinosaurs and came to this conclusion
An egg is technically a single cell. So, eggs came first as those were the first forms of life.
Eggs are single cells, but all single cells are not eggs.
They know, but the person they originally responded to is making a faulty inference in the form of "pigs = mammals, mammals emerged at X date, pigs emerged at X date". They aren't properly recognizing that eggs are a distinct subset of unicellular organism (which I also think isn't actually true of fertilized eggs) and you can't infer from the set "unicellular organisms" having a trait that "eggs" has the same trait.
The snake and lizard branch is wrong. I care very much about the accuracy of memes, and I have to point out that many lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards.
Maybe they meant chicken eggs but I guess the chicken egg is still first in that case
Yeah, this is silly (and fun) but avoids the real problem of course. The question can be like you said, "which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg?" And for those that still want a literal answer, wikipedia says:
If the question refers to chicken eggs specifically, the answer is still the egg, but the explanation is more complicated.[8] The process by which the chicken arose through the interbreeding and domestication of multiple species of wild jungle fowl is poorly understood, and the point at which this evolving organism became a chicken is a somewhat arbitrary distinction. Whatever criteria one chooses, an animal nearly identical to the modern chicken (i.e., a proto-chicken) laid a fertilized egg that had DNA making it a modern chicken due to mutations in the mother's ovum, the father's sperm, or the fertilised zygote.
As an alternative, though it's a bit more of an ungainly mouthful, I like: "which came first, the first species to lay an egg or the egg of the first species to lay an egg?" That one is a bit harder but you might still be able to tease out an answer. That way I think it gets a bit more into the problem of qualitative vs quantitative when you do (which is partly why I say below that this is related to the problem of the heap). Of course it's really meant to be a philosophical problem anyway, and in that sense, it remains a paradox. It's a way of making an analogy for a "causation dilemma" and gets at the idea of infinite regress and the paradoxes that brings up. It's also related to the sorites paradox or the problem of the heap, which actually is an element discussed in Marxist (more because of Engels) dialectics.
The egg came first. To the chickens disappointment and, who left to find a more satisfying partner.
I guess the tree branch needs to start somewhere, but why leave out amphibians?
