"Words have meaning, and names have power. The universe began with a word, you know. But which came first: the word, or the thought behind the word? You can't create language without thought, and you can't conceive a thought without language. So which created the other and, thus, created the universe?"
— Lorien, "Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?", Babylon 5
The Chicken-and-Egg Paradox
consists of a closed cycle of elements that lead in series to one another, with no clear starting point or endpoint. This tends to lead to an open question of how, exactly, the cycle was initiated to begin with.
This is often just a mistake by the writer, but in some cases the paradox is intentionally set up as foreshadowing of later developments. Or it could just be that the Intended Audience Reaction is for the viewers to go, "Wait a minute, what the cluck?" In which case, see Rule of Funny.
The Trope Namer, which has become a Stock Joke, originated as an ancient thought experiment first recorded by Aristotle: the chicken lays the egg, but it also hatches from it, resulting in a seemingly infinite cycle of chicken ➡ egg ➡ chicken ➡ egg. Aristotle and his successors considered this a key ontological mystery of the nature of the universe; in later years people tended to invoke Divine Intervention to explain it. The advent of modern biology ruined the postulate: the literal answer to the original question is that the egg came first, on the grounds that eggs predate the evolution of chickens.
Sister Trope to the Catch-22 Dilemma, a similar scenario where there's no way to start addressing a multiple-element problem because addressing any one element requires you to first address the others. Supertrope of the Stable Time Loop: Time Travel can open the way for scenarios where the time traveler initiates an action in the past whose future ramifications lead to them having traveled back in time to begin with. A Cycle of Revenge can play out this way if it's gone on long enough to become a Forever War.
If you were looking for tropes actually about chickens, see Chicken Joke.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger: Monk and Pochiro will turn literally anything into an argument, so when the unsolvable Trope Namer comes up, naturally they'd snap at each other about it. Their teammates suggest asking Tart, the Zodiac Chicken Spirit, might settle the debate. Of course she'd know about her own species's origins, right...? She doesn't.
Comic Books
- In Empyre #1, Reed Richards is working out whether Hulkling forged the alliance between the Kree and Skrulls, or if the alliance came first and they then made him their leader. He compares it to the chicken-and-egg question, then gets Sidetracked by the Analogy, pointing out that since reptiles lay eggs and birds evolved from reptiles, naturally the egg came first. Sue bemusedly tells him to get back on-topic.
Fan Works
- Psyche Ward: When Taylor sees a "mental cobweb" in Basic Braining, she notes how it's another Literal Metaphor and wonders if they pick their names for these phenomena based on what they are, or if they form in shapes based on how people think about mental processes. Oleander tells her that that's advanced Psychonaut business.
Film — Animated
- Chicken Run: In the ending, the rats Nick and Fetcher discuss their plans to start their own chicken farm, and get into an argument with each other about whether they should have a chicken to lay eggs or an egg to hatch into a chicken as their starting point.
- The Rankin/Bass Productions special The Easter Bunny Is Coming to Town has a whole song attempting to answer this question, sung by three hens. They reference the Christian Bible story of The Ark (since Everyone is Christian at Easter), saying that because Noah took chickens, not eggs, onto the Ark, then the chicken obviously came first.
Jokes
- I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I'll let you know.
- Face it... nobody came until the rooster did.
Literature
- In the poem "Explained" by A. A. Milne, a girl wonders how God began, since if He made everything, who made Him? She asks her doll Jennifer Jane (who may or may not be sentient) and Jennifer Jane squeaks, which the girl takes as an answer, but the audience is left in the dark.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: When Harry and Luna try to enter the Ravenclaw common room, the tower guardian asks them the riddle "Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?" before allowing them to enter. This references the fact established back in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that phoenixes spontaneously combust when they die and then resurrect from the ashes (Dumbledore's pet phoenix Fawkes even bounces back after intercepting an Avada Kedavra aimed at Dumbledore). The question of how or whether the phoenix was birthed in the first place is never addressed.
- In one of his apologetic writings, C. S. Lewis points out that philosophical/cosmic evolutionism (the idea that everything always evolves to ever increasing complexity; his only comment about the theory of evolution is that it's the best explanation we have right now but that doesn't mean it's actually what happened and refers to scientists who believe in it as the only viable alternative to special creation as "amateur philosophers") is only believable when you accidentally or intentionally ignore either the cyclical nature of life or that many simple ideas actually descended from complex ones (he mentions chicken and egg, acorn and tree, rocket designs, and civilizations).
- Star Wars Legends: The novel Planet of Twilight has a Forever War on the planet Nim Drovis between the Drovians and the Gopso'o (two ethnic groups of the same species). The Cycle of Revenge has been going on for so long that nobody can even remember anymore if the Drovians attacked the Gopso'o first or vice versa, and a Drovian queried on the subject says he doesn't even care, it's enough that a Gopso'o killed his mother. To cap it off, other material reveals that the original cause of the war was an argument over whether the word "truth" was singular or plural.
- Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen: Demons must be summoned into the world using a ritual that involves demon flesh. It takes a while for anybody to notice the contradiction this raises: how did the first demon get summoned? This is answered in volumes 4 through 6: the Butcher delivered the demon meat to summon the "first" demon from the hands of the Suffering Saint, who had created the world via a contract with "God" after destroying the last one with "Diablo"—respectively the natural forces of creation and destruction, the latter of which demons are fragments of.
- Troy Rising: When humanity starts reverse-engineering alien technology, their prototype Artificial Gravity generators are clunky, prone to lethal malfunctions, and fly to pieces under anything but the lightest use. By the time they discuss this with Tyler Vernon, the scientists have worked out that the only tool capable of making an efficient gravity generator is another efficient gravity generator.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: In "Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?", Lorien, one of the Precursors in the series, muses, "Words have meaning and names have power. The universe begun with a word, you know. But which came first: the word, or the thought behind the word? You can't create language without thought, and you can't conceive a thought without language. So which created the other and, thus, created the universe?"
- Sesame Street: A 1972 Sesame Street segment referenced the paradox with the song "Chicken or the Egg", which played over footage of farmers collecting eggs from hens and putting them into cartons for shipment. The song notably never attempts to answer the question, but merely demonstrates to children where the eggs in their refrigerator come from.
Mythology and Religion
- The Pirkei Avot, a classical Jewish text, argues that God created the first pair of tongs, on the grounds that one would need to already have a pair of tongs in order to forge a pair of tongs. The normal non-miraculous explanation is that pre-Iron Age tongs were probably either cast from a metal with a lower melting point (e.g. bronze), or consisted of two pieces of water-soaked wood that were then used to hold the hot metal while it was forged.
Theatre
- Curtains: Lt. Cioffe has this exchange with Broadway composer Aaron Fox:
Cioffe: Can I ask? Only because I've wondered this my entire life — Which would normally come first? The music, or the lyric?
Aaron: Same answer as the chicken or the egg.
Cioffe: Ah. So it's the lyric.
Video Games
- Dwarf Fortress: An anvil is required to make a forge and a forge is required to make an anvil. There is a meme among the players about where the first anvil came from, since no dwarf would be able to build the forge to create the first anvil. In gameplay terms, embarking without an anvil carries a risk, as you'll dependent on a trader having one for sale in order to perform any blacksmithing.
- Fate/Grand Order: In the Oniland event, Sherlock Holmes isn't sure if Chitose's Holy Grail created the Singularity and then summoned Sitonai, or if Sitonai herself materialized in Chitose which then triggered the Holy Grail, using the chicken and egg paradox as a comparison.
- Guilty Gear -STRIVE-: The game's Big Bad, Happy Chaos, brings up the paradox to describe himself, and goes further by presenting a seemingly nonsensical answer: "The omelette came first". Combined with his catchphrase, "I am X, or Y. But I do exist", it could be taken to mean that Chaos's origins are irrelevant to his present insane state, in the same way chickens and eggs only really matter as food.
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" You know the question. But do you know the answer? The omelette. The omelette came first. The omelette is the reason the chicken and egg exist. I could be anything you like, or nothing at all. But... I do exist.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games:
- The games have a sidequest in which you have to help two NPCs named Bippin and Blossom raise their son. Depending on the choices you make, the child might at one point ask you if the cucco or egg came first, responding "But what did it hatch from?" if you tell him "Cucco" or "But what laid the egg?" if you tell him "Egg".
- Oracle of Ages has a couple opportunities to combine it with Time Travel to create a Bootstrap Paradox. One part of the Chain of Deals to get the Noble Sword is to trade for a Goron's family heirloom; you then trade this vase to his ancestor in the past, which the ancestor then passes down to his descendants, creating a vase of infinite age with no point of origin.
- 7 Days to Die: This is a Downplayed Trope with regards to a wrench. To craft a wrench, the player needs mechanical parts, but the easiest way to get mechanical parts is to disassemble machinery — which requires a wrench. However, wrenches themselves can occasionally be looted, and mechanical parts can sometimes be found by looting hardware stores.
- Splatoon 2: One of the Splatfests is Chicken vs Egg, where the debate was not which was better for once, but rather which one the player believes came first.
- Alan Wake has a big one. To escape an eldritch abomination called the Dark Presence beneath a small town lake, Alan, a professional writer, writes a story about his escape, and he finds manuscript pages throughout with describing events he has already experienced or is about to experience. A subplot involves a poet named Thomas Zane who was in the same scenario as Alan decades earlier who apparently wrote his writing out of existence to temporarily stop the Dark Presence. Near the end of the game, Alan finds a manuscript page that apparently Zane wrote about Alan decades before Alan arrived but still matches what Alan is going through like his own manuscripts. It introduces the question of whether Alan is a creation of Zane to stop the Dark Presence once and for all, if Zane is a creation of Alan's that Alan somehow retroactively wrote into existence in his story, or possibly if they somehow wrote each other into existence. The sequel only adds more questions with the reveal that Thomas Zane (or at least a person claiming to be Zane within the Dark Presence's realm) looks exactly like Alan (and is now known as a film maker for some reason) and that Zane (in NG+) meets a man with the same voice as Alan who teams up with Zane for some sort of project.
[[folder:Web Video]]
- AsapSCIENCE: This video takes the "chicken" question and answers it literally, determining that the egg came first. The reason is because centuries ago, two "proto-chickens" would have mated and, due to genetic mutations, produced the first chicken which hatched from an egg.
- Jon Bois discusses this in part 2 of his Dorktown series "The Story of Dave Steib", alleging that sports journalists denied Dave Stieb the Cy Young Award because he was rude and dismissive to them — and that Dave was rude to sports journalists because they robbed him of the Cy Young Award.
Jon Bois: He's often a standoffish jerk to the press. That's true. It's not nice. And there's certainly a chicken/egg debate to be had over whether the writers' ignorance towards Dave Stieb fueled his rude behavior toward them, or vice versa.
- Matt McMuscles brings this up in his video about Cancelled Spider-Man Video Games. A proposed sequel to Ultimate Spider-Man (2005) didn't get the green light because the first game didn't sell well enough, and the game's lead texture artist attributes weak sales to Activision's lack of faith in the game:
Chris Salazar: There's a funny "chicken-and-egg" situation, where the company is trying to forecast sales to determine how much to spend on promo, but if you don't spend on promo, you don't get sales, so... I get the impression that Activision didn't have strong, long-term plans in those days.
- Exploited in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. Joey tells Serenity to overload Super Giga Mecha Nesbitt's logic circuits and confuse him to death. She tries using this specific paradox on him as an attempted Logic Bomb; however, he responds with "The rocket powered fist," which Serenity objects to, until he launches such a fist at her.
Western Animation
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender we have an episode focusing on two rival tribes. Their animosity is because the founder of one tribe dishonored the other, but we don't know who dishonored whom. It shows both versions but they are irreconcilable, and at the end we don't know the truth since Aang lied to make the fighting stop.
- Bluey: In "Takeaway", Bingo asks Bandit something; if only adults have babies, who had the first baby? After a Beat, Bandit changes the subject by saying that they should just go home.
- Following the Chicken Run example above, Aardman revisited it in Creature Comforts, with two children (represented by grazing sheep) discussing the conundrum. They eventually agree on a quiet muttering of, "It's confusing."
- In Gravity Falls, in the last episodes it is revealed that ancient aliens crashed on Gravity Falls long ago. And one character muses if the spaceship crash caused all the weird things that happen on the place, or if all the weird things there caused the spaceship to crash.
- Justice League Unlimited: In the episode "Question Authority" Superman confronts Professor Hamilton when the former finds the later working for Cadmus. They debate about whether or not superheroes are going to turn on humanity and try to rule them when humanity tries to stop them, or whether the superheroes are destined to do that from the moment they start existing. The professor closes with "The Chicken or the Egg, Superman?"
- Xiaolin Showdown: When Jack Spicer gets his hands on the Rio Reverso, he uses it on a multitude of things. Among them, he asks this question and uses the Rio Reverso on a chicken turning it into an egg. Then the egg turns into a chicken shortly after, and it keeps changing between the two.
Jack: Perhaps there were things we were not meant to know.
Real Life
- Bootstrapping refers to the creation of self-compiling compilers for a given Programming Language: in other words, compilers able to compile their own source code. Methods include using an intermediate compiler made in another languagenote , writing intermediate compilers in a subset of the targeted language, compiling on another platform or even writing the compiler by hand in machine code.
