Which Killed First, the Chicken or the Egg?

The question — not the one above, exactly — is seemingly timeless: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Chickens hatch from eggs, so you need an egg to get a chicken. But you also need a chicken to get an egg — chickens lay eggs, after all. You can’t have one without the other, and yet, we now have both. So, which came first? It’s a fun question to debate.

Unless you and your friend are drunk. Then, it could be dangerous.

Before we get to that part, though, let’s explore some of the more serious answers to what is often intended to be a philosophical question. Eggs definitely predate chickens — birds have been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and some dinosaurs came from eggs. Chickens have evolved over time, and the first chicken, whenever it appeared, came out of an egg laid by a non-chicken. As Time Magazine explains, “At some point, some almost-chicken creature produced an egg containing a bird whose genetic makeup, due to some small mutation, was fully chicken. Given the incremental nature of genetic changes, locating that precise dividing line is pretty much impossible, but chickens were domesticated, diverging from their wild counterparts, sometime in the range of 7,000 years ago.”

But on the night of July 24, two men at at bar in Indonesia were probably not taking the question so seriously — or, maybe they were taking it too seriously. One of the two men, a 47-year-old named Kadir Markus, arrived at the bar to pay a debt he owed to another man, identified only as “DR.” DR, per the Independent, “invited Markus [ . . . ] for a drink and began posting a series of riddles.” It’s unclear what questions were asked — maybe DR started with “Thirty white horses on a red hill, First they champ, Then they stamp, Then they stand still” or perhaps the more straightforward “What is in my pocket?” But we know that, in the end, the two began debating the finer points of the chicken-and-egg question. And we also know that DR — who was drunk at the time — was not happy with Markus’ drunken response. Why? Here’s what happened next, via NDTV:

As the conversation turned into a heated debate, Mr. Markus tried to distance himself from the argument, refusing to engage further. Mr. Markus decided to go back to his home, but DR grabbed a dagger and chased him on his bike and then on foot before attacking him multiple times. The weapon used in the crime was a badik, a traditional dagger of southern Sulawesi’s coastal tribes like the Bugis and the Makassarese.

Markus did not survive the attack. DR was charged with murder and faced an 18-year prison sentence. It’s not clear which side of the debate either person took, either.

Bonus fact: In 2000, a trio of students at Iowa State University started an online message board for their fellow students called Cheggpost. After a series of pivots and changing of founders, the company ultimately became Chegg, an education company that, among other things, rents text books to college students. The name of the company, per the New York Times, “is shorthand for “chicken and egg,” a reference to what [founder Osman Rashid] called students’ quandary after graduation: they need experience to get a job, but can’t get experience without having a job.” As of this writing, Chegg is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $158 million.

From the Archives: The Prophet Hen of Leeds: This chicken didn’t lay these eggs.