El huevo y la gallina

“El huevo y la gallina” is a recurring expression for problems in which cause and consequence cannot be cleanly separated. In the novel it moves from evolutionary biology to cosmic history, from the intertwined legends surrounding Ana and a photograph, and finally to the relation between bodily life and love. Each use tests the limits of a one-directional explanation: what looks like a beginning may depend for its meaning on what comes after it, while the supposed result may also be necessary for the beginning to be recognized as such.

Definition and Recurrence

The expression names an irresolvable question about priority: whether the egg or the chicken came first. Rather than offering a biological answer, the novel uses that familiar puzzle as a model for circular causation and retrospective meaning. It recurs in conversations between Frank and José, in Frank’s reflection on Ana and an image associated with her, and in a later exchange with Vera. Its changing applications make it less a single proposition than a portable figure of thought.

That portability matters. The expression connects arguments that might otherwise remain separate: whether evolution has a purpose, whether the history of the universe can be understood from its eventual outcomes, how a story can make an earlier event seem fated, and whether love can be reduced to the bodily conditions that sustain it. The repeated image does not prove that these questions have the same answer. It shows instead how easily a simple linear account breaks down when the parts of a system depend on one another.

Evolution and Retrospective Purpose

The expression enters the novel’s scientific discussion after José asks Frank whether life on Earth was propelled only by unpredictable mutations or whether natural science might be overlooking mechanisms connected with intention and purpose. Frank initially responds with conventional scientific explanations and feels the strain of being drawn back into a question he has tried to set aside. As the conversation develops, José argues that human consciousness should not be treated as an arbitrary quality in life’s struggle for existence. He proposes that the development of increasingly specialized ways of sensing and understanding the world may point toward intellectual vision as a direction of the evolutionary process.

Frank’s account of evolution supplies a counterweight to that proposal. He describes repeated developments of sight, flight, and upright walking, and explains natural selection through small advantages that make an individual’s genes more likely to be inherited. When José presses him about how rudimentary wings could help before they were useful, the conversation exposes a tension between a mechanism that accounts for inheritance and a larger claim about where life is going. The egg-and-chicken figure gives that tension a temporal form: an early stage may appear purposeless if judged only by what it can do at the time, while its significance may become visible only in light of later developments.

John’s intervention extends the argument across geological time. He observes that three hundred million years ago it would have been premature to call life absurd or without purpose, because its supposed end might not yet have had time to emerge. In his account, people living now belong to the vanguard but have not reached the goal; only in a hundred, a thousand, or a billion years might it become possible to see where the process was heading. His claim does not establish that the future literally causes the past. It recasts the question of purpose as one whose answer may be available only retrospectively.

The debate becomes explicit when John says that the Big Bang may have had a purpose, although contemplation of that purpose is retrospective for human beings. Frank objects that causes point backward in time and cannot belong to the future. John answers by inviting a reversal of perspective: perhaps the absence of life’s later development would have made earthly existence appear absurd, but since that development occurred, the earlier process can be viewed as part of a journey whose significance is disclosed by its eventual course. The egg-and-chicken idea thus unsettles the boundary between cause and outcome without eliminating the distinction Frank is defending.

Ana, the Photograph, and the Closed Circle

The image becomes more intimate when Frank applies it to Ana and Goya’s painting. He recalls Ana’s heart condition and challenges the suggestion that she died because she had already become identical to the woman in the painting, as though the resemblance had completed a predetermined story. The opposite account is just as possible: the model in Goya’s painting could be called identical to Ana at her death because the photograph of Ana was taken only hours before she collapsed. The two formulations reverse which likeness explains the other, leaving neither direction secure.

José answers that the alternatives are like the egg and the chicken: the riddle cannot be solved by choosing either end as the starting point. In his account, when the dwarf took the fateful photograph of Ana, the story of the photograph fused with the story of Ana’s resemblance to Goya’s maja. The circle was closed. The myths surrounding the dwarf had begun somehow in the gardens of the Alcázar, and there they also ended. The photograph is therefore not merely evidence placed beside an already complete legend; in José’s telling, it becomes the point where two narratives meet and make each other seem inevitable.

Frank’s comparison identifies the same circular structure more plainly: Ana, he says, is like the photograph the dwarf took. The exchange keeps the uncanny connection open while refusing to certify its truth. Frank says he does not claim to believe the stories, and suggests that José may not believe them either. The expression clarifies how the stories have become interdependent, but it does not settle whether their apparent design reflects supernatural agency, coincidence, or the retrospective patterning of events.

Cosmic Time and the Journey

Later, José returns to the limits of looking backward. He argues that wisdom acquired after the fact is still wisdom and that people are more their past than their future. Frank acknowledges the possibility that something happening now might receive its meaning from a much later event. José complicates even the distinction between before and after: what is seen far away in space, and therefore billions of years back in the history of the universe, is also, in his formulation, a cause of events in the present. The universe is at once the egg and the chicken.

This cosmic image does not simply repeat the evolutionary argument. It makes observation part of the problem: the remote past and the present are connected through the act of seeing and interpreting, so temporal distance does not yield a simple line of explanation. José says that the travelers do not know where they are going; only at the end of the journey will they find the cause, or the reason, for having begun it. Since that journey may extend over many generations, humanity remains in a fetal state, unable to recognize the purpose of much that is happening now. Even an apparently insignificant event might later appear to have been a necessary condition.

His example is a child who sold a deck of cards to a young sailor. José’s question gives the expression a narrative dimension: an event’s importance cannot always be measured at the moment it occurs, because later events may place it in a chain of consequences that no participant could then see. The repeated image therefore describes not only a theory of the universe but also a way of reading a story, in which small beginnings acquire consequence through what follows.

Biology, Love, and the Limits of Reduction

In a conversation with Vera, Frank presents a deliberately reductionist account of human life. A human being, he says, is a biochemical process lasting at best eighty or ninety years, while genes are the underlying agents of reproduction; the organism is their survival machine. On this account, the gene, not the person, is life’s end, and the egg precedes and matters more than the chicken that it produces. The vivid conclusion—that the chicken can therefore be shut in a cage—exposes how a description of biological mechanisms can become an expansive claim about what deserves value.

Vera treats Frank’s argument as an acceptable summary, but he rejects her attempt to let it pass. He predicts that in fifty years most people will laugh at this worldview and calls his generation of biologists collectively guilty of a reductio ad absurdum. The egg-and-chicken formula here marks both the power and the limitation of reductionism: it can identify a reproductive mechanism, but it does not by itself establish that the organism’s significance is exhausted by that mechanism.

The final use shifts from the origin of life to the conditions of love. After Vera says that blood must flow through the veins before people can love, while insisting that this does not make blood more important than love, Frank suggests that this too may be like the egg and the chicken. His explanation is reciprocal: without blood there would be no love, and without love there would be no blood. The claim does not erase the distinction between biological necessity and human attachment; it refuses to rank the two as though one could be dismissed once the other had been named.

Frank then says he has finished with the excessive reductionism that has weighed on the century like a nightmare, and connects that change to the approaching turn of the millennium. Across the novel, the expression’s final force lies in this resistance to a single explanatory direction. It accommodates scientific mechanisms, retrospective interpretations, and intimate dependencies without proving that the universe has a predetermined goal. Instead, it asks readers to hold open the possibility that a beginning and its apparent outcome may become intelligible together.