In which it is explained how to solve the problem, in hopes of pointing out that paradoxes like withdrawing from Iraq can be solved by understanding what we are talking about, and THEN applying rules of logic and understanding.
Q: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Those are your choices...either the chicken or the egg. Any other answer is wrong. (This condition is the problem.)
A: Contrary to popular belief, this age-old dilemma actually has a very straightforward solution.
First, you must specify what kind of egg you mean. If you mean "any kind of egg", then the egg came first (because chickens were preceded on the evolutionary timeline by, for example, egg-laying fish, insects and dinosaurs).
If, on the other hand, you mean "a chicken egg", then you must specify whether this means (a) "an egg laid by a chicken", (b) "an egg containing a chicken", or (c) "an egg laid by and containing a chicken".
In cases (a) and (c), the answer is by definition "the chicken" (if the answer were "the egg", then the egg could not have been laid by a chicken).
In case (b), the usual and most interesting interpretation, the answer is "the egg".
This is because interspecies mutations separating a new species from its parent species occur in reproductive rather than somatic DNA, i.e. in germ cells rather than body cells.
(Germ cells include the sperm and egg cells produced in the reproductive tracts of male and female animals respectively.) Since germ cells are merely produced, but not somatically expressed, by the parents of the organism(s) whose biological information they encode, their expression begins in the egg containing the offspring. So the egg contains a chicken, but was not laid by a chicken. (See how easy that was?)