In cases like these, the biological species concept breaks down. But if there is to be any set labelled “chickens”, then that set must have boundaries, else we be forced to say that every living thing on the planet is a “chicken”. How do we define these boundaries? I don’t claim to know. But it doesn’t matter.
Don’t try to answer the question, that’s impossible. Only try to realize the truth…there is no chicken.
It was really bothering me the way Professor David Papineau, “an expert in the philosophy of science”, says, completely without justification, “If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg”, so I went searching for the source of this story that’s suddenly all over the place. I thought maybe the original paper might have some reasoning that didn’t make it into the stories.
Googling for “Chicken egg Papineau” got me lots of versions of the same story. Telling it to only include web sites without “kangaroo” still got me lot’s of the same, with no scientific paper in sight. Then, tucked in at the bottom of Age-Old Chicken And Egg Puzzle Solved Sky News I found something referencing the original source:
“The debate was organised by Disney to promote the release of the film Chicken Little on DVD.”
:sigh:
Wouldn’t a more interesting debate be about whether the sky is falling?
On the one hand commets and meteorites fall to earth all the time.
On the other, a good chunk of the sky (albeit not the stars in our galaxy) are, if anything, anti-falling (moving away at an accelerating rate).
Now what happens if a proto-chicken that is taken out of the bounds of our host galaxy then lays an egg that is to cross the infinitessimal divide into chickenhood. After exploding from vapor pressure and freeze-drying into egg-jerkey, in which direction shall said remnants fall. And provided that the gravitational effects of the Milky Way do not overpower the intergalactic repulsionary force, and the chicken is hurled across the trade routes of superintelligent civilizations, could this be construed as a reason that the chicken crossed the road? Or is the question inappropriate because we should just call it an abortion?
The language analogy is usually apt, but it doesn’t go the distance, because a language is not made up of individual entities; it’s not even a physical thing.
Language flows; it’s more like a stream. Chickens are a series of discrete individuals. The fact is that there is a difference between indivual chicken A and individual chicken B. At some point along the spectrum, one individual chicken aquired all of the genetic material that made it Chicken; its parent lacked whatever the final mutation was that made Chicken Chicken. Utterly impossible to identify the individuals, of course, except as a thought exercise, but that’s all this is.
That first chicken came out of an egg, which therefore came first. The further semantic discussion about whether that was a chicken egg is irrelevant to the original question, if interesting in its own right.
No, you are simply wrong. That’s implying that all chickens have the same DNA or that evolution is about discovering that last mutation. No, in any population there are a great many alleles (versions of genes) floating around. Evolution is about how those general trends shift. Some alleles become more numerous, others decline. The chicken and the thing-before-the-chicken actually have pretty much the exact same alleles, but in different numbers. Likewise, if you look into the human population, you’ll be able to find all the right genes out of which to construct our ancestor. Maybe a few things might’ve been lost (although among 6 bn people that’s not too likely), but you’ll end up with enough to realize how evolution actually works.
Emanuel Kant, the last great philosopher of words ran into the limitations of words/concepts and declared it a self enclosed world beyond which the mind cannot go and was chastised by the status quo.
A tree cannot exist by itself except in the word-world of the mind. I real tree comes with sunshine, air, earth, and water; it is part of an ecological system. Most egos live in the artificial world of their own minds and not in the ecological world of their bodies, hence the disastrous decline in the health of body-mind-spirit-earth.
We are lost in the information world of our own minds, which is a vast but also unreal world. Information is not experience. But to the people who live in and on information it “feels” real to them, even though their real world is falling apart. We can’t seem to get our head out of our ass which is the reason why our lives stink!
“Intelligence is quickness to comprehend as distinct from ability which is the capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.” Alfred North Whitehead
Bless The Beast And The Children, a movie and a song.
ugh, we need to stop talking about people from hundreds of years ago. they oftentimes made good points, but they framed them in their own particular less-than-perfect ways and if we keep repeating them, we’ll never end up growing ourselves. philosophy class is taught completely backwards. it is an excercise in scholarship not in thinking, and i would think a class of philosophy should be THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
aaanywaay… we are not trapped in “words” per se. That is WAY too simplistic a concept. However, we are of course trapped in the way we understand things and in the ideas we have and the conceptions we hold. We are trapped very subtly in a certain perspective, and the webs and structure of understanding are FAR more complex than simple labels and words. Of course words are constructed to reflect that underlying framework of thinking, and probably shape it as well. But by far, we don’t have a word for every concept. Our concepts transcend mere words. The way our concepts interact even transcend mere sentences, and even paragraphs, to be describebable only by books. Of course books have near perfect flexibility, so the major artifacts in our thinking are owed to us repeating our ideas to each other, not to some outside agent. It is just philosophically incorrect to say that world of our mind is directly the world of words.
Kant was coming close to the truth in saying that the whole problem is that most of us get our understanding by reading or even hearing. What you call the “information” world. Well, yeah, the writers we read have biases and have constructed their worldviews in their own ways, and if we read them we’ll mold our understanding to be like theirs and not be able to look at the same things from a slightly different angle and see it in a bit less imperfect light.
Rather ironic that you are now such a scholar of Kant’s words, don’t you think?
Er, I don’t think what I said was all that different from what had Kant.
Rather, the distinction comes in realizing that it is not the concepts we hold that determine our worldview and our mind. They do, of course. But there also exist, with equal importance, far more subtle artifacts which we would never identify as concepts themselves but which determine the physics in our minds of how the concepts we have interact.
Er… I am talking jibberish. Just have an appreciation that that the mind works on all scales and levels, and that that idea is already communicated when people talk about having their thinking “in a box” or whatnot.
What I think is troubling is that reading Kant too closesly, who was trying to explain things to the less refined intellects of his time and had to contort his presentation to be on a more obvious level, may lead someone to forget all the subtlety that exists beyond mere “labels,” “words,” and “concepts.”
Now you’ve just entered bullshit land. Send me a postcard.
If we go down to the root of this problem, it is really a saying meant to confuse people. The less enlightened think ‘but which could come first, because if the chicken came first, where did it come from, but if the egg came first, what laid it’. The answer to this is obviously the egg was laid by some other creature, and through the minor mutations common in mitosis the creature inside the egg crossed over the line and became defined as some form of chicken. Hence the egg came first, because it was there before the chicken was.
I can’t believe that all of you have missed one crucial fact: the saying is rhetorical. In fact, I’m pretty sure it predates (and thus has nothing to do with) evolutionary theory.
It’s based in the viewpoint that life has pretty much been this way forever, with an endless chain of chickens and eggs stretching backwards as far as you want to go.
It’s a metaphor, people, meant to highlight a difficulty in determining cause and effect. It’s not meant to be answered. It’s being held up as the canonical example of an unanswerable question. When a man points, only a fool looks at the hand.
Careful with the sweeping statements.
Hey, you calling my cat a fool?
I agree with you, the Chicken Question is rhetorical — and yet you’ll notice that Cecil, the experts in the cited BBC article, and others seem to regard it as answerable through the application of science and reasoning. Few seem to notice, or maybe believe, that the question is just too poorly worded to be answered as given. If this is the conclusion we’re meant to reach, then in practice the question usually leads us down the wrong path.
I find this fact interesting in and of itself, regardless of the evolutionary history of the chicken.
Humty Dumty sat on a wall (in deep meditation)
Humty Dumty had a great fall (profound breakthrough)
All the priest forces and all the king’s men (social pressures)
Couldn’t put Humty back in his ego again!
To “educate” means to lead out.
To “evolve” means to unfold and open out.
To “enlighten” means to break through the shroud of conditioned thinking.
I sympathize with this line of reasoning, which is also Cecil’s reasoning in his column on the subject. It’s also what the BBC article presents as an authoritative answer. It also seems to be the answer that most people comfortable with evolutionary theory argue for.
But, trust me, if you pose the Chicken Question to enough people, even non-creationists, you’ll find some who insist that the first egg could not exist until there was a real, bona-fide chicken to produce it. Ergo the chicken was first.
This is not a silly way of looking at the issue, however much some might think so. It’s just a matter of differing interpretations. The core problem is that “the egg” referred to in the Question is not pinned down well enough for the question to be answered.
Sophistry! Sophistry and Kant!
I have to go with Alex here. What the h*ll are you saying in these posts of yours? That words are bad? Information is bad?
That’s a pity if true — and quite a blow to the SDMB, which is dripping with the stuff.
A cerful perusal of the works of The Great Master leads me to believe that He understands the rhetorical nature of the question, and his response was purely ironic. Note in particular His treatment of the sound of one hand clapping.
Well, all right, that could be my misreading.
To me it is a classification question. Is the egg not a chicken?
We are told that mayflies live for only a day, and then only to mate and lay eggs. For months, however, the larvae live (underwater, I think) until they hatch as mayflies and the cycle starts anew. It seems to me that whatever you call that creature, the version that lives for months has as much claim to identity as the adult version.
Nature does not make leaps, eh?
If we’re allowed to consider any egg at all, then obviously the egg came first, since there were egg-laying beasties around long before chickens. But that’s too easy an answer, and counter to the spirit of the original question. So we rephrase the original question, and ask “Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?”. At this point, the task then becomes defining a chicken egg: Is a chicken egg an egg laid by a chicken, or is it one which will hatch into a chicken?
On this point, I think I may have to recant slightly from my previous position, due to an analogy from agriculture. I can, for instance, plant seeds in my garden which will grow into Sugar Ball Watermelons. The packet these seeds come in will label them “Sugar Ball Watermelon Seeds”. But Sugar Ball Watermelons do not themselves produce any seeds; they’re a hybrid of two other watermelon varieties which do produce seeds. So we can’t identify seeds by the species of their progenitors, as I suggested we do with eggs, since some seeds don’t have any single progenitor. Or, in other words, for some plants, the seed must come first, because the plant cannot produce seeds.