cm0002Just so there's no confusion
A chicken egg came before the chicken because it is the same animal and the egg stage is earlier than the adult stage.
nexguyif you want something crazier, look into ring species. where different species of animals have all their in-between species still alive and mate with each other, but the ones at the extremes cant mate with each other
Proto-chicken>chicken>eschato-chicken
Chickens have “evolved” in recent years more than recent centuries
We just keep the chicken name but at what point do they become a different animal.
Evolution is slow and has no definite point in time of “First official example of a 2000s definition of a chicken”
It’s similar to the paradox of the heap.
Of course a “chicken” layed the first chicken egg. But if we called that “chicken” a chicken then her egg would be the first chicken egg. Not the one she just layed.
Yeah it’s an arbitrary line. Slow changes generation after generation, but where normally those changes balance out (a tall person is not much more likely to reproduce with tall people than short people), when a trait is advantageous/disadvantageous to survival or reproduction or encourages those with it to only reproduce with others with it sometimes it tilts the scales and slowly a proto deer/horse finds itself increasingly adapted to water to the point its leg bones become vestigial
The proto-chicken was a mutant Red Junglefowl. Just like a proto-dog was a mutant wolf.
You do not get a Red Junglefowl laying a 2000s definition of a chicken egg. You get a Red Junglefowl laying an egg with a mutation that that “Red Junglefowl” will pass on.
Every generation the Red Junglefowl becomes closer to the 2000s definition of a chicken.
It wasn’t a “mutant” in the sense that one Red Junglefowl was born to create the chicken egg what we know as a 2000s definition of a chicken.
Yeah, there’s never a hard dividing line between a species and its immediate predecessor. Merely a gradual chain of mutations that eventually results in distinct populations. If those populations can’t successfully interbreed even if transported to meet, they’re different species. The definitions for asexually reproducing organisms are even more fuzzy. This concept that taxonomy doesn’t have fixed divisions confuses a lot of anti-evolutionists.
socsaEven that isn’t really clear in practice as I understand it. The genetic drift from proto chicken to chicken likely means that there is no single instance of proto chicken birthing chicken, even if you could fully sequence the DNA of every proto chicken. It’s kind of an inconvenient issue with DNA taxonomy, because if we really did have that full DNA history, there would likely be several different populations with overlapping genetics and we might actually choose to draw that line for a number of different mutation combinations when they start statistically creating certain traits, instead of a single mutation. But oh no now we are back to descriptive taxonomy so let’s just move on.
The reality is that we haven’t really observed speciation in a controlled setting, so the current framework almost requires us to sample the evolutionary timeline at long intervals, or it starts to get sloppy.
Well…yeah, that’s how evolution works. Answer is still the Egg.
…mutations.
This is the best argument I’ve heard yet.
Someone could argue that the egg isn’t part of the animal, the “egg stage” just applies to when the animals was growing in the egg. But it’s a pretty difficult argument to make.
Depends on your definition of “chicken egg”. Language is defined by the way people use it and nobody (other than perhaps a few people in this thread) has ever bothered defining what a chiclen egg is: Is it an egg laid by a chicken or is it an egg that contains a chicken
When you go to the supermarket you call that a chicken egg because it was laid by a chicken, even if the egg is incapable of ever containing a chicken (at least from what I know you can’t grow chickens from supermarket eggs) So arguably that means eggs laid by chickens are chicken eggs. But nobody has ever had to define whether an egg containing a chicken is also a chicken egg, even if the egg was not laid by a chicken. So if you don’t define an egg laid by a proto-chicken to be a chicken egg then you would say that the chicken came before the egg.
It’s really a question of creationism vs evolution… God would’ve created the chicken first
I’ve always understood this debate as a veiled religious thing. Chicken = religion, god creates chickens; or Egg = science, animals are products of evolution, and thus naturally the egg must come first.
Did God create humans, or did humans create God?
rnercle
KraidenEven if you’re talking about chicken eggs specifically it’s still the egg first. The first chicken egg would have been laid by a proto chicken
But is it a chicken egg because it hatches into a chicken or because it is laid by a chicken?
Because it hatches into a chicken, you’re thinking of a chicken’s egg
“chicken’s egg” is the owner of the egg the chicken inside it, or the one who laid it?
Likewise it’s not clear that “chicken egg” refers to the creator of the egg or the inhabitant of it.
Pretending for the sake of semantic argument that any of these scenarios were possible:
If an alligator laid an egg and a chicken came out, was that a chicken egg?
If a chicken laid an egg and an alligator came out, was that a chicken egg?
But now consider, you know what I mean by the following phrase:
“An alligator laid a chicken egg, and an alligator hatched out of it”
One who laid it. Yes it is, it’s the inhabitant. Yes. No. You mean alligator egg, not chicken egg.
“you mean alligator egg”
No, I didn’t. And yet you still likely understand what I mean, or get close enough to what I mean that it doesn’t matter, unless you’re being intentionally obstinate.
And what do you think of the idea that the egg is simply a phase in the life of an animal, that the chicken is the egg it hatched from, not just the former inhabitant? In this case how can the egg be owned by the animal that laid it if it is itself an animal?
Like the caterpillar is the chrysalis is the butterfly, the chicken is the egg.
If it hatches into an alligator then it’s an alligator egg, so yeah you did mean alligator egg. I actually don’t know what you mean, because what you described doesn’t make sense.
And I do think think that, it belongs to that creature just like you belong to your mom and vice versa. If somone pointed at your mom and said “that’s PeriodicallyPedantic’s mom” and you said “Aha! But how can she be mine when she’s a different person!”, they’d probably just say “the fuck you on about”.
I honestly do not believe that when I said that, you not only didn’t but we’re unable to imagine an egg that by all properties confirmed to the expectations of a chicken egg until an alligator miraculously hatched out of it.
I do not believe you’re debating in good faith
I genuinely cannot imagine that. It doesn’t make any sense. The only property that is a necessary condition for an egg to be a chicken egg is that it has the potential for a chicken to hatch from it. So what you are describing has an inconsistency and is therefore nonsense. Do you mean an alligator egg that looks like a chicken egg? Because if so, then it’s still an alligator egg.
Literally the only thing that matters is that an alligator hatches from it, so it’s an alligator egg.
The amazing thing about imagination is it doesn’t need to be consistent or based in reality. People can typically imagine such things.
For example, I can imagine an elephant disguised as a normal sized human in a trench coat, because within my imagination, hammerspace can exist.
As such, I can imagine an egg that has every single property of a chicken egg; look, flavour, size, smell, colour, etc, such that it was absolutely indistinguishable from a chicken egg until it miraculously hatched an alligator. I extremely strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of people would have understood what was meant by the thought experiment.
And literally you’re just asserting you’re correct by fiat. The people on the other side make the exact same argument about their side. You seem to be missing that this entire dilemma hinges on the fact that there is no specific definition for “chicken egg”, so to claim you’re correct by definition is baseless afaict.
The best argument I’ve seen so far is that the entire dilemma doesn’t even make sense since the chicken is the egg; it’s the same animal just in different phases of its life, therefore one cannot come before the other; it’d be like saying “which came first, the chicken or the other chicken?”. But that comes dangerously close to the question of when life begins, so gonna try to avoid that.
So I can imagine what you are describing, that is not the issue. It’s just that I would not call that a chicken egg. And I could imagine a world in which it would be, but that’s then not where we reside so it’s not relevant.
Definition of an egg: an animal reproductive body consisting of an ovum together with its nutritive and protective envelopes and having the capacity to develop into a new individual capable of independent existence.
That’s the definition of an egg, not chicken egg.
There is no universally accepted definition, that defines it by the creature that laid it or the creature that hatches from it.
If there was, this dilemma wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be any debate.
Wait, so is an unfertilized egg referred to as a chicken’s egg, and never a chicken egg?
MatSeFiI feel like this kinda answer just shows you haven’t really thought about the problem in depth.
I feel like this kinda answer just shows you haven’t really thought about the problem in depth.
I feel like this kinda answer just shows you haven’t really thought about the problem in depth.
I don’t think It’s that clear, are eggs named by what created them, or what they contain? I could certainly see an argument that the first chicken hatched from a proto-chicken egg
I always love to bring up that this boils down to an argument about definitions, given the assumption we’re talking about chicken eggs.
Ok, but does it matter what it’s called? If it contains a modern chicken, and it’s an egg, whether it’s a chicken egg, or a proto chicken egg is debatable. But the egg definitely came first
Not if we are specifically asking about whether the chicken or the chicken egg came first (which is what the original comment in this chain implied), because if proto-chickens lay proto-chicken eggs and a chicken was hatched out of one, then the chicken came before the chicken egg
Sure but that’s changing the question, the original question is “which came first, the chicken or the egg” not “the chicken or the chicken egg” so the answer to the question, as posed, is definitely: the egg