Chicken.
What, don’t believe me? Look it up! It’s in the dictionary!
(incidentally, that was my favorite joke as a kid)
Genetic alteration can take place at many points along the lifetime of an organism. Oonosis, Meiosis, Mitosis, fertilization, gestation, and any point during the lifetime of the organism. So, when a particular line reaches the point of “chicken” will be unpredictable.
The egg, as a biological method of reproduction is far older than the chicken. So, the egg came first. Chickens, along with ducks and such came much later. Recently it seems that some evidence places birds much earlier than thought, perhaps much more ancient than some dinosaurs. Or perhaps not. However, the egg predates both lines.
Tris
It’s amazing to me that an egg ever gets laid given it takes it over 3 minutes to get hard.
The dinosaur!
He should have figured it out, since the chicken was playing “Mother and Child Reunion” on the CD player.
- Evolution happens in populations, not to individuals.
- “Chicken” is an artificial construct.
Eggs, of course, predate chickens by a wide margin. The real question, of course, is whether chicken eggs came before chickens. And thence comes the problem that “chicken” is an artificial construct. Populations change gradually, with individuals possessing varying degrees of various traits. It simply did not happen that one single individual laid an egg from which the very first chicken was hatched. Speciation (or the development of new breeds, which is actually what we’re talking about, since chickens were created via artificial selection) is not something that can be pinpointed in time; we can only “see” it after the fact, by comparing Population A to some arbitrarily-chosen Population B in the past. if they are sufficiently different, we say it’s a new species. If Population B was the immediately prior generation, then there would be no discernible difference between A and B (at least, not within the observable bounds of variation), sufficient to declare B a separate species (or even breed) from A.
Ergo, the issue is unresolvable. If you create a mountain out of small pebbles, then remove a single pebble, is it still a mountain? What if you then remove another pebble? And so on. It’s the same sort of deal - gradations don’t allow for easy answers.
I had an egg for breakfast, and chicken salad for lunch. Therefore, the egg came first.
Sorry.
That’s correct! ding ding
OK, so those eggs you buy at the grocery store… Are they chicken eggs? How can you justify your answer, given that nothing will ever hatch out of them?
And whether that egg can be defined as a chicken egg or not is entirely a matter of opinion - there are two perfectly valid, but entirely contradictory arguments:
- it was laid by a not-chicken so it’s a not-chicken egg instead
- it contains a fetal chicken, so it’s a chicken egg.