The Chicken and the Egg

There is an ancient riddle about which came first, the chicken or the egg. This riddle has become proverbial as a marker for situations in which it is impossible to state with certainty which of two events caused the other. “It’s a chicken and egg situation,” they say. But this is not about that riddle. For the purposes of this brief essay, the egg comes first. The egg comes before the chicken, because it is the egg which must develop into the chicken.

I don’t eat fried chicken much any more: too much cholesterol. It’s really too bad that I have to watch my diet that way, because I grew up on my mother’s fried chicken, and it was really good. I remember loving fried chicken when my mother would cook it up for Sunday dinner. I would have been surprised - no, I would have been shocked - if I had sat down to the table, expecting a platter of golden-brown fried chicken, and been handed a bowl of scrambled eggs instead. I think most of you would have been disappointed, and even if you like scrambled eggs better than chicken, you surely know the difference.

We all know the difference between a chicken and an egg. They look different, they act differently, and they certainly taste different when they’re cooked. And yet, according to some people, there’s no difference between a chicken and an egg. They’ll tell you that an egg has all the DNA of a chicken, and that an egg, once fertilized, will certainly become a chicken. And isn’t that the same thing? Well, no. If Wendy’s handed out fried-egg sandwiches to people who ordered their Crispy Chicken sandwiches, they’d have a riot on their hands.

There was an essay in the Sunday Gazette here in Colorado Springs stating that very thing, but using people instead of chickens as an example. There’s a ballot measure here to recognize embryos as legal persons as soon as conception occurs, and we’ll have to vote on that November 4. One of the arguments used in favor of the initiative is that embryos are people, because they have all the DNA of a human being, so they should count as human beings themselves.

Now, as soon as you think about chickens and eggs, and realize that a fetus is the equivalent of an egg for a mammal, you’ll realize that embryos and fetuses aren’t people. They’re potential people, and, under the right circumstances, in about nine months, they’ll turn into real, independent people. But there’s nothing certain about it. Just as many eggs end up as omelettes, instead of turning into frying chickens, about half of all concepti spontaneously abort. All that DNA is necessary to make a human being, but it isn’t sufficient. There’s a lot more to being a human being than just having the right set of chromosomes.