Answering classical paradoxes

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

These are my opinions, and I’ll stand by them damn it!!! :smiley:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The Chicken of course.
If you’re a creationist, then God created the chicken.
If you’re an evolutionist, since eggs are laid, you couldn’t have an egg first, because, there was no chicken to lay it. But then if you have a chicken, how did it come into being? It evolved from another species.

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around, does it make a sound?
Yes.
If sound is defined as the vibration of air, then when a tree falls, it vibrates are. Thus, it makes sound.

As for the irresistible force meeting the imovable object.
I don’t know.
The only thing I can think of is that the irresistible force pushes so hard the they rotates the earth in the opposite direction, thus, having the same effect as if they had moved the imovable object. :confused:

#2

Right. If that’s how we define sound – which is the question at the heart of that dilemma. If we define sound as something that is perceived, then the lonely tree falling does not make a sound.

FWIW, I firmly support the latter interpretation. The tree does not make a sound (spare me the ‘what about the squirrels?’).

#3

I would point out, as an evolutionist, that dinosaurs and such were obviously laying eggs millions of years before chickens came into being as chickens. Also, individuals don’t “evolve from another species”; every chicken was born a chicken. However, we have to assume that chickens evolved from some ancestor, which we shall for the sake of this argument call the Proto-Chicken. At some theoretical point, the Proto-Chicken (love the sound of that) laid an egg inside which was not a baby Proto-Chicken, but the first chicken.

The point being that there were eggs for hundreds of millions of years before the first chicken popped out of one.

If the question were rephrased as “Which came first, the chicken or the CHICKEN egg,” you’d have a paradox.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a terrific essay on this topic, which is reprinted in “The Flamingo’s Smile.”