What is older - the egg or the hen?

They are both the same age.

I like your answer, @kritiper, because it’s funny. :)

I don’t rate it as a GA, but I’m still saying that I like it.

I liked @kritiper‘s answer because it made me think of this:

They’re both the same age, because the first hen was female and the first egg was male. The hen needed to have a rooster, for if it had remained alone in all eternity amen, it would have never been able to lay eggs. And if it couldn’t make eggs, there would have never been an egg to be found in the whole world. Apart from the first one of course, that was supposed to release a rooster who would then make it possible for the hen to “give birth” to the very first second egg in all history. Or to be yet more precise, to the very first third egg, because the very first second egg didn’t go well, so the hen had to abort it – which was the first abortion in recorded history. The very first abortion of the very first second egg, which was then successfully followed by the very first birth of the very first third egg in the world.

Depends on what your definitions of egg and hen are.
Is it an egg the moment the cell is formed, or only once the egg shell has formed? Is the hen a hen when it is still an egg cell? Is it a hen when it is still a chick? Or only once it has fully matured? Is a boy a man?

I mean….eggs have been a part of reproduction since the beginning of sexual reproduction. Hens are female chickens, a specific species that is far more recent. So the egg is older as a concept.

But your phrasing is vague (probably deliberately) so it’s unclear whether that is the way you meant the question.

Which egg and which hen?

Each egg came out of a hen, and that hen is older than the eggs that it hatched.

Eggs exist before they’re fertilized. So the egg that hatches a hen chick, existed as an unfertilized egg (with none of its father’s DNA contribution) before the hatched hen, and before the embryo that became a chick that hatched.

So for the egg a hen hatched from, the egg was slightly older than that hen.

I like @ragingloli,‘s @Entropy‘s and @Zaku‘s answers as well, but give GA only to the latter two, although their answers aren’t like the answer I’m going to write here in a day or two.

That hen has to be older than an egg she just laid.

The first egg laying species was around half a billion years ago. Chickens were domesticated at most 10,000 years ago. So as object categories, the egg is much older than the hen. But like @SnipSnip said, any given egg must be younger than whatever laid it.

There was a series of mutations that eventually led to the first chicken. The egg containing the final mutation preceded that first chicken, so the egg came first.

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
The flip answer is the rooster.
Since we supposedly evolved from fish, and they lay eggs, I’ll go with that.

Before I write my own funny answer, I’d like to say that I agree with those who said that the egg is older, because it existed before chickens were created to lay them. Those dinosaurs laid eggs, but they were no chickens, so the egg is older as a concept or as a category.

Meaning, those answers can go as definite answers to that quasi-paradox. But as I said, it’s about providing a funny answer to my question.

It just occurred to me that I had to give you my own answer to this funny question of mine.

What is older – the egg or the hen?

As you know well, an egg* lives for about 21 days. That means, eggs don’t get much older than just 3 weeks.

Hens usually live for 5 – 10 years before they enter Chicken Paradise. Or in the worst case just for a couple months before they enter a pot.

So, a hen is always older than an egg.

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I think that’s my last contribution on Fluther. Have a nice time, every one.