So Sophie,

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?

-In Need of a Thesis Topic

Hey Thesis,

seudo-philosophers around the world have been debating this very question for centuries and still haven't found a satisfactory answer. Do you honestly think that you're finally going to be able to get answers to debates like this from an Internet advice columnist? Ha! Do you think you're trying to be cute and mock me? I will not stand for that, you know. Is it your plan to plagiarize the answers I give you and use them to start your thesis? No dice, my friend. I insist upon being included in your bibliography.

Actually, it's your lucky day. It just so happens that you have picked the one person dispensing advice who is prepared to help answer this never-ending conundrum. OK, that's not entirely true. But I'm going to condense it for you.

The answer to this question is different depending on how you approach it. From an evolutionary standpoint, it would have to have been the egg, since a genetic mutation in the female parent would have to have combined with a similar one in the male parent at the moment of fertilization to yield that which we now know as a chicken. From that point, it would have had to mate with another organism that also happened to have the exact same set of genetic mutations. The resulting offspring would have only those genetic traits in its DNA and after a bit of incest with its siblings, we would have seen a whole new species emerge (had we either been around trillions of years ago or purchased a Chronosync Motivator from QX, Inc.). An adult chicken would certainly not have materialized out of nowhere. To go around honestly believing stuff like that is just plain ludicrous. And if it came from somewhere else, then we would just have to go to wherever that was and ask our question again. The only way to avoid the question is if you assume that chickens have always existed and, thousands of years ago, just started randomly appearing across the world just in the nick of time to feed starving people. I'm not sure that this is somewhere you want to go, since it will either lead you to the conclusion that chickens are some sort of altruistic über-race whose sole mission is to prevent hunger among lesser species, or that God put them there because we might want them for something.

We certainly are not going to even broach the topic of creationism here in my column. If you want to talk about that, go move to Kansas or something with the rest of the lobotomized public. We here in Sophie's world are just going to ignore that one entirely. No way in hell did some mysterious being just go around dropping chickens on people. God, indeed. Hmph.

However, let's go back for a second and look at the other possibility. What if chickens really are on an altruistic mission to provide delicious food for the inhabitants of this planet? Has this theory ever been refuted? Do you recall any spokeschickens holding a press conference to deny any of this? Have representatives of the chickens' home planet ever said a thing? No, they have not. Maybe chickens are the true saviors of the world and are content to rest in that knowledge rather than trying to make themselves known and collect all sorts of glory. Because let's face it: the very second that chickens reveal those sorts of intentions to us, we're not going to eat them any more. No. We will give them awards and such but no one in the world would ever kill one again, thereby negating the whole point of the mission anyway. Revelation would be the key to the failure of the whole operation.

It's also possible that the chickens here are not on a mission of any sort. Perhaps the authorities on their home planet are using the Earth and some kind of interstellar prison colony and dumped spaceships full of chickens here as punishment for their crimes against chickendom. Perhaps the unwitting criminal masterminds were unable to replicate human speech and therefore were mistaken for simple birds and are now forced to live in huge prison colonies, mating with whomever is available and being forced to live like animals. The lucky few manage to escape to free-range setups, where they are able to lead a slightly less miserable existence but it's still just brutal. Now I'm kind of feeling sad for the poor bastards but it's the sort of risk you run when getting dropped on alien planets. I just hope that this sort of thing never happens to me.