Which came first, the chicken or the egg? We toss around this question like the be-all, end-all irresolvable conflict of the human race, as if logic and reasoning screech to a halt when encountered by this mysterious paradox. To many’s dismay, this is simply not the case. It turns out that an understanding of biology as rudimentary as mine suffices to unravel this dilemma.

The short answer is that the egg came first—it had to. Of course the moment I so proclaim this is the moment my fellow skeptics pop the question, “If the egg really did come first, where then did this first egg come from? Did it simply pop into existence out of oblivion?” As much as I would have liked to witness such an occurrence, unfortunately, that is not how it happened.

Instead, our story begins a long, long time ago with a female bird from a species quite closely related to chicken. Let’s call her Bathilda. As it turns out, good old Bathilda was recently fertilized by her male counterpart and is about to lay an egg accordingly. When this almost-chicken Bathilda lays her egg, she does not realize that it has actually mutated enough to become the first ever chicken egg. Indeed, the natural processes of mutation and recombination that have driven evolution for centuries have struck again.

Naturally, our threshold for what constitutes a chicken is hardly clear-cut. It would be practically impossible to distinguish this almost-chicken from the first chicken, but regardless, a line must be drawn however arbitrarily. In that way, our first chicken egg must have preceded our first chicken because it was conceived from a non-chicken species of bird. There you have it, folks. Universe solved—now we can go back to arguing about productive things like whether Snooki is a better dancer than Miley Cyrus.