cm0002Just so there's no confusion
TIL the first chicken egg wasn’t laid by a chicken
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.