"Chicken or the egg?"

I hate that question..... it is the egg..... anyone who says "chicken" either A) believes a magical man in the sky created ever creature as they are, which has relatively been disproven or B) says "well who laid the egg?" Without actually thinking about evolutionary ancestors of the chicken slowly changed into a chicken over time by laying generations of eggs

Ah but it can be argued that since the first chickens hatched from eggs before the threshold between the modern chicken and it's predecessors was observed that you couldn't identify that it was a chicken until it is a chicken

It's impossible to answer because it's impossible to define at what specific mutation an animal became a chicken. Mutations can occur at any time, including the zygote phase and into adulthood, though zygote mutations are more common.

the changes to DNA after birth are minor. Not anything that'd lead to major evolution like that. Just your programming getting wonky as you age/ are exposed to various things in the environment. But yeah, causality dilemma don't really have a solid undisputed answer

The chicken and the egg arose simultaneously. It isn't possible to distinguish a species from its immediate ancestor. If "Almost Chicken" Animal A give birth to "Chicken" B, then "Almost Chicken" Animal A is actually a chicken. One generation is not enough time to separate species, and since there are both chickens and eggs throughout generations, the answer is both. And no, the existence of god/gods has not been disproved because it cannot be tested. Also, mutations during the life of an animal do not usually translate to the next generation unless they involve gametes. However, a possible alternative is a mutation (or disease) in the mother that affects hormone release and can lead to epigenetic changes.

*Usually being the keyword here. You can't ignore the slim possibility during the many years of evolution especially since chicken generations are shorter, though as mentioned before, you can't tell when a chicken became a chicken. In any case, the point is rather moot. I like pancakes.

Scientifically, the egg. Evolution has occurred for millions of years, and it goes a little something like this. Dinosaur is born from egg. Few thousand years One dinosaur is born but was different from the rest, it had a feather or 2 on it. (mutation) then the dinosaur had babies and those babies had feathers. Few more thousand years later, the babies were smaller, and eventually they had a beak. then those babies had babies and some of them were further mutated. Then one day after thousands of species of mutations, a chicken species was hatched from an egg.

Neither the egg nor the chicken came first. Each is different than the preceding state from the previous loop. egg a is different than egg b. In the end, bacteria came first- not the egg or chicken.

@iii_otaku_iii Your scientific assessment isn't really accurate. As discussed above, species don't suddenly appear. In addition, your feather example is only slightly related to genetic speciation. Unless the feathers are the phenotypic expression of dominant genes, or they provide an advantage, there would be no change in the population.