The egg came first. Unless you believe in intelligent design, then some deity poofed the chicken.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
303 points (95.2% liked)
Memes
45536 readers
293 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Well that’s why it’s a philosophical(?) question. Yes evolution made the chicken, but what would you call what laid that egg if not a chicken first?
If it wasn’t a chicken that laid it, it’s not a chicken egg, so the egg couldn’t come first. What hatched would be a chicken and it would than lay chicken eggs.
What comes between chickens and their non-chicken ancestors? The problem is in our human need to classify everything into different neat boxes, when it's an actual long and continuous process. In short, the "dilemma" created is more of an argument about what separates species, and that's a hell of a rabbit hole with no single answer.
But the answer is the egg, since a chicken born from that egg is different than its parents.
But a chicken didn’t lay that egg, so it’s not a chicken egg. That’s the crux of the paradox.
There is no answer is the answer.
You're right in that it's not meant to have an answer as it's normally told philosophically. But the biological and evolutionary answer is that there is no dividing line to give that answer because species don't change with individuals but with large populations over great amounts of time. We see those lines because we find fossils of things related to but different enough to others to call them a different name. And the real mind blower is that almost all creatures that did exist never left fossils to find.
The false dilemma of the chicken and the egg shares the same misunderstanding that the "missing link" fallacy does. There's no line between things except over time and thousands of generations.
By that logic there no such thing as a chicken because things never evolve past a certain evolutionary animal.
Two answer.
"Chicken" comes before "or the egg."
Or
Whatever layed the first chicken egg was not itself a chicken, but a few tweaks of the genome away. I this regard, the real answer is "The egg."
The egg since eggs existed long before the first chicken. Since the question does not specify it HAS to be a "chicken egg" just egg
Definitely the correct answer.
Unless scientists decide chickens are still the same species as their wild counterpart (the red junglefowl), like with dogs and arguably pigs.
Probably won't bother, honestly.
The problem with this question is that its assumption is so wrong that it is rebdered meaningless. Chomsky once wrote the sentence “Colorless greed ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that has syntactic correctness but no semantic meaning. Also, why a chicken, in particular? Why this animal who has been so successfully domesticated and differentially bred over centuries that calling it out is like Roy Confort calling out the similarly domesticated banana as evidence of god and creation?
In any case, eggs came first. The egg, if you will, is basically a big cell. It has a lot going on, but it got figured out long before modern birds, much less the domesticated chicken.
But of course, that’s not what they really mean. What they really mean is - how do you get from not-chicken to chicken without the biological equivalent of a big bang (and I’m not even touching on how cosmogenesis gets misunderstood)?
And the real answer is that, whether we’re talking about natural or human driven evolution, there’s no line between chicken and not-chicken. Its fairly easy for us to say that a cat is not a chicken and that a jellyfish is not a chicken, but as you get into the later dinosaurs and early birds, you start to move into grey areas.
Which brings us back around to semantics. As humans, for some reason, we like hard categories around things. That’s often not how the real world works. There’s really a lot of just continuous blessings, and ideas like species are a convenient label for us to understand gross differences but whose utility starts to fall apart once too closely examined. The definitions written in textbooks for high school students are unhelpful, as they represent the ideas as if they were handed down from on high, rather than “this is a convenient way of organizing things for some of our purposes.”
So the answer is "yes"
No, it's the egg.
The answer to which came first would be the male proto-chicken.
I don't think the question had to be about chickens. It could be about anything. Just a lot of people have chickens and therefore eggs. It could be about any animal.
Eggs were around millions of years before chickens
Long before the chickens roam the earth, there were the dinosaurs that laid eggs.
So eggs came before the chicken.
I agree, the universe definitely came first.
The egg
I think the correct answer is sharks.
sideways amogus
Easily explained. God is actually a giant chicken and laid the egg. What you see here is the universe being served sunny side up. I’ll see myself out