Which Came First, the CHICKEN or the EGG? An Old Amish Farmer's Answer
Elias Yoder Explains
1,896 views
🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach:
https://eliasyoder.com
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? You have heard it your whole life, and it always ends the same way, with folks going round and round in a circle. Say the chicken came first, and somebody asks where that chicken came from if not an egg. Say the egg came first, and somebody asks who laid it if not a chicken. And round it goes, with no end to it, until everybody laughs and gives up.
Now I am a man who keeps chickens, and has kept them all my life, and I gather eggs from my own hens every morning of the world. So folks might expect I would have a thought about this. And I do. I have a plain answer, the one my people have always given, and I want to share it with you today, gently and without any argument in it, along with a good deal about the hen and the egg themselves, which are far more wonderful than most folks stop to notice.
I am Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Let me say plainly at the start what sort of video this is, so nobody is caught off guard. I am not a man of science, and I am not going to argue anybody out of anything. I am a plain farmer of a plain people, and I am going to give you the answer we have always held, which comes from our faith and from the plain sense of the barnyard. If you see it differently, you are welcome at my table just the same.
What I walk you through:
✔ My plain answer, given straight: the chicken came first, made a hen whole and complete and able from the first to do what a hen does, which is lay eggs
✔ Why the riddle only goes round forever if you suppose the whole thing had to build itself out of nothing, and how it simply falls open once you start where we start
✔ The wonder of the egg itself: a whole little sealed world, perfectly provisioned, with the food, the water, and the building material all inside, needing nothing added from outside
✔ The shell that is strong enough to guard yet riddled with pores too fine to see, so the chick can breathe while the moisture stays held in
✔ The little pocket of air waiting at the fat end for the chick's first breath, and the hard point on its beak, put there for one purpose, to chip its way out, which falls away after
✔ How every single piece of that arrangement only works if all the other pieces are already there, so it only works entire
✔ The hen made for the egg as surely as the egg is made for her, with the whole apparatus to build the shell and the instinct, set in her from the first, to nest and sit and turn her eggs and call the chicks under her wing
✔ A gentle word of respect for those who see it differently, and no quarrel with anyone
The plain wisdom underneath it all: the riddle is really a question about beginnings, about the first cause you reach when you chase the chain backward. My people have always said the chain has an end, and the end is God, the one who began it and is not part of it. There is a great rest in that. My grandfather used to say a man could wear himself out asking where everything came from and never get his hay in. Some questions are given us to wonder at, not to solve. When I bring a warm egg out from under a warm hen on a winter morning, I do not stand there troubled about which came first. I stand there grateful.
This is one of a series on Elias Yoder Explains, where I take the ordinary things of daily life that everybody handles and nobody really understands, and explain them plainly, the way the careful old folks understood them.
Tell me in the comments below, and let us keep it kindly. What answer were you given to this old riddle growing up, and by whom? And for the chicken-keepers among you, what is the most wonderful thing you have seen in your own henhouse, watching a hen set and the chicks come? And to those who see it differently than I do, you are welcome here, and I would rather hear you kindly than argue. I read every single one.
Next video: how an eggshell, so thin you crack it with a flick of your hand, can at the same time be so strong that if you close your whole fist around a whole egg and squeeze with all your might, it will not break. Subscribe so you do not miss it.
#ChickenOrEgg #Eggs #Chickens #AmishWisdom #PennsylvaniaDutch #Faith #Homestead #PlainSense #BackyardChickens #Creation #Hens #FarmLife #SimpleExplained #EliasYoderExplains #EverydayWonder
19 Comments
God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good. [22] God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."
God said it, that settles it
The Evolutionary Answer
The Original Egg: Shell-covered eggs laid on land (amniotic eggs) evolved around 340 million years ago with early reptiles and amphibians.
The First Chicken: The modern chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) only evolved around 58,000 to 10,000 years ago through the domestication of wild red junglefowl.
The "Chicken Egg" Paradox
Even if the question is strictly narrowed to "Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?", the answer is still the egg:
Two birds that were almost chickens (proto-chickens) mated.
A tiny genetic mutation occurred in the fertilized zygote during conception.
That modified zygote developed inside a chicken egg.
Out hatched the world's very first true chicken!
In short: An animal that was almost a chicken laid an egg containing the mutation that created the first actual chicken. So, the egg takes the crown.
Which Came First, the CHICKEN or the EGG? An Old Amish Farmer's Answer
Elias Yoder Explains
1,896 views
🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach:
https://eliasyoder.com
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? You have heard it your whole life, and it always ends the same way, with folks going round and round in a circle. Say the chicken came first, and somebody asks where that chicken came from if not an egg. Say the egg came first, and somebody asks who laid it if not a chicken. And round it goes, with no end to it, until everybody laughs and gives up.
Now I am a man who keeps chickens, and has kept them all my life, and I gather eggs from my own hens every morning of the world. So folks might expect I would have a thought about this. And I do. I have a plain answer, the one my people have always given, and I want to share it with you today, gently and without any argument in it, along with a good deal about the hen and the egg themselves, which are far more wonderful than most folks stop to notice.
I am Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Let me say plainly at the start what sort of video this is, so nobody is caught off guard. I am not a man of science, and I am not going to argue anybody out of anything. I am a plain farmer of a plain people, and I am going to give you the answer we have always held, which comes from our faith and from the plain sense of the barnyard. If you see it differently, you are welcome at my table just the same.
What I walk you through:
✔ My plain answer, given straight: the chicken came first, made a hen whole and complete and able from the first to do what a hen does, which is lay eggs
✔ Why the riddle only goes round forever if you suppose the whole thing had to build itself out of nothing, and how it simply falls open once you start where we start
✔ The wonder of the egg itself: a whole little sealed world, perfectly provisioned, with the food, the water, and the building material all inside, needing nothing added from outside
✔ The shell that is strong enough to guard yet riddled with pores too fine to see, so the chick can breathe while the moisture stays held in
✔ The little pocket of air waiting at the fat end for the chick's first breath, and the hard point on its beak, put there for one purpose, to chip its way out, which falls away after
✔ How every single piece of that arrangement only works if all the other pieces are already there, so it only works entire
✔ The hen made for the egg as surely as the egg is made for her, with the whole apparatus to build the shell and the instinct, set in her from the first, to nest and sit and turn her eggs and call the chicks under her wing
✔ A gentle word of respect for those who see it differently, and no quarrel with anyone
The plain wisdom underneath it all: the riddle is really a question about beginnings, about the first cause you reach when you chase the chain backward. My people have always said the chain has an end, and the end is God, the one who began it and is not part of it. There is a great rest in that. My grandfather used to say a man could wear himself out asking where everything came from and never get his hay in. Some questions are given us to wonder at, not to solve. When I bring a warm egg out from under a warm hen on a winter morning, I do not stand there troubled about which came first. I stand there grateful.
This is one of a series on Elias Yoder Explains, where I take the ordinary things of daily life that everybody handles and nobody really understands, and explain them plainly, the way the careful old folks understood them.
Tell me in the comments below, and let us keep it kindly. What answer were you given to this old riddle growing up, and by whom? And for the chicken-keepers among you, what is the most wonderful thing you have seen in your own henhouse, watching a hen set and the chicks come? And to those who see it differently than I do, you are welcome here, and I would rather hear you kindly than argue. I read every single one.
Next video: how an eggshell, so thin you crack it with a flick of your hand, can at the same time be so strong that if you close your whole fist around a whole egg and squeeze with all your might, it will not break. Subscribe so you do not miss it.
#ChickenOrEgg #Eggs #Chickens #AmishWisdom #PennsylvaniaDutch #Faith #Homestead #PlainSense #BackyardChickens #Creation #Hens #FarmLife #SimpleExplained #EliasYoderExplains #EverydayWonder
https://eliasyoder.com