The "chicken or the egg" question is over.
The egg came first. That's it. There's the answer.
Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.
Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal's life.
In all honesty, I figured that out years ago without significant knowledge of science, and I've never understood why this wasn't immediately apparent to everyone.Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.
posted by Chris Althouse Cohen at 12:08 AM
3 Comments:
But their result seems backward to me. I mean, look, in a certain sense the egg always came first: there were eggs long before there were birds. So when we ask, which came first? we mean, which came first, the chicken or the _chicken egg_? And the chicken egg can't have come before the chicken.
Those scientists are answering, aha! don't you see, by the time it's in the egg, it's already, genetically, a chicken. But that seems to require that the chicken, not the egg, is first (see, this is a chicken --- therefore this other thing it's in is a chicken egg. The chicken comes logically first.) And in fact, I'd even say it's still wrong. Let's say the first chicken evolves from brachiosaurii. So one daym a chicken hatches, amazingly, out of what we would have called until that moment a brachiosaurus egg. So again, the chicken appears first. Only when _it_ produces an egg do we speak of a chicken egg. No?
Oh, man, the word verification right now is "luggg."
Good gracious, the sky really IS falling!
But what I want to know is this: How did that first so-called chicken egg ever become fertilized? How did the first ovum inherit its second set of DNA, its W chromosome? Whence cometh it's male gametic contribution?
Oh, and one more thing: Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong?
Who the heck was that man? I'd like to shake his comb.
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