There's no universally correct answer, but the "why" part can be interesting to dissect

Egg, chickens come from eggs so the egg had to come first.

It honestly never occurred to me to choose the egg simply on the basis that every chicken starts as an egg, but that seems to be the most sensible starting point in the cycle.

It doesn't necessarily answer whether the very first chicken started as a chicken or an egg, but that wasn't explicitly what the question was asking.

According to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (or PNAS, best abbreviation ever) the chicken was domesticated around 1,500 bce (although that is debated and some people place it as far back as 8,000 bce). Most of the genetics of the chicken is from the red junglefowl, but a substantial portion of its genome is contributed from other species of junglefowl suggesting that humans crossbred various species of birds. The “original” chicken egg was most likely a hybrid egg laid by a mom that was a non-chicken species of junglefowl and fertilized by a different species of non-chicken junglefowl. The “original” chicken was hatched from that egg. The egg came first. Of course this opens up a different debate about what exactly does it mean to be a chicken. Are junglefowl just misunderstood chickens?Currently sitting alone in this room I have no direct evidence that chickens actually exist and it is entirely possible they are a global conspiracy or a figment of my imagination.

My favorite solution to the chicken/egg conundrum comes from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

"Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The Egg -- laid by a bird that was not a Chicken."

If the latter is true then the chicken must come first.

You also raise a good point about the minutia of where did the proto-chicken end and the modern chicken begin. Wherever that line gets drawn, it was put there by people and has no bearing on the actual organisms it delineates.

Makes me think of Pluto: "First you name me after a fabrication, then place me within a contrived system, then you rearrange my placement in that system...I am completely unchanged by your efforts. Your attempts to define what you see succeed only in revealing truths about yourselves."

Which one, and why?

The chicken, who would incubate the egg, take care of the chick to ensure it grew to adulthood? Makes more sense the adult came first. God created Adam fully grown, He didn't drop a newborn in the garden. Lol

I fancy the question as a litmus test for origin story sensibilities. To a creationist, the chicken came first. To an evolutionist, the egg came first. Settled. 😉

But it doesn't answer my question who laid the egg, who hatches it and feeds the chick. How would it make sense even from an evolutionary standpoint?

That assumes the egg hatched. Technically it doesn't even need to be laid to be an egg.

But we can agree that God would have put the hypothetical first egg or chicken on this earth to begin with right? 😉

We could agree that God was responsible for the first organism that chickens evolved from. 😏

Ok. Fair enough

i feel like the chiken came first

Believing science can be settled to the satisfaction of the layman seems like quite a leap of faith.

i find that most laymen don't care enough to be satisfied or not. settling science to the satisfaction of scientists, that's the tricky part

Even brilliant minds fall into the trap of personal edification.

ikr? ( :

The egg cuz it hatches the chicken