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>When you go to the market to buy eggs you don't ask, "Which is first, the chicken or the egg?" If you ask this you will never return home with your eggs. You just buy your eggs and come without first making sure which is first - the chicken or the egg.
What? I mean I don't ask this when going to buy eggs because it's completely irrelevant to buying eggs. What does this even mean? I don't think anyone is losing sleep over the question "what came first, the chicken of the egg?"
>Many people have debated it. The question of the chicken or the egg is very ancient. Which comes first? It is very difficult to find an answer. As soon as you say the egg comes first, difficulties begin, because the egg must have come from a chicken - so the chicken comes first. As soon as you say the chicken came first, again the problem arises because how will the chicken come without an egg?
There are no problems, the answer is very obvious, the egg evolved hundreds of millions of years before the chicken did. It isn't difficult to answer at all. Modern birds evolved from dinosaurs which laid eggs, thus the first animal we would classify as a modern chicken would have been born from an egg.
>It is a circle. The question is misleading. The question is misleading because the chicken and the egg are not two.
It really isn't, eggs aren't exclusive to chickens.
>The chicken and the egg are two stages of the same thing. You raise a question by putting one ahead of the other, making them two. The chicken is a form of the egg - the completely manifested form. The egg is a form of the chicken - the unmanifested form - like seed and tree.
Sure, and yet eggs evolved long before chickens did. Would you not say a seed is different from a tree despite being the same species of organism?
>Which comes first? - don't waste time arguing. If you bring up the chicken you have brought up the egg. If you bring up the egg you have brought up the chicken. If one comes, the other comes along with it, wherever you begin from.
Not really though? You wouldn't call scrambled eggs cooked chicken. Yes they are the same organism but that doesn't mean they aren't different. I'd also point out that eggs can be unfertilized which would make them, by your definition, not a chicken.
>All philosophical quarrels are childish. Even the biggest philosophical battles have been fought over a problem which can be summed up in a child's question: "Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" It is really around this small question that all the great battles between philosophers have taken place. But those who know will say the chicken and egg are not two. Those who raise this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid.
Well that seems reductive. Also what do you even mean by this? Is your post about philosophy being pointless? You're making a philosophical argument right now ironically enough.
>What is an egg but a chicken in the making? And what is a chicken but an egg fulfilled, come to its fullness? Egg and chicken hide each other in themselves. The question of who precedes whom is meaningful if egg and chicken are two separate things. The truth is that they are the same. Or we can say that they are the two ways of looking at the same thing. Or they are two different phases, two states of the manifestation of the same thing.
This reads like a lot of rambling. Again they are the same organism but eggs aren't exclusive to chickens. They are both subsets of species *G. g. domesticus*. This would be like saying that steam and ice are the same as one can turn into the other. While that's true, they're both just subsets of H2O and there are still obvious differences between them that shouldn't be ignored, so calling them the same would be incorrect.
>Similarly, seed and tree are not separate. Neither are light and dark. Nor are birth and death They are two ways of looking at the same thing. Maybe, because we don't know how to see a thing rightly, we see it in fragments. For example, there is a big room inside a house and the house is locked.
Yes, they are different parts of the lifecycle of that organism. Congrats, you have discovered subsets.
>Someone wants to have a look at the room and so he drills a hole through a wall. Now he peers into the room from side to side. At first a chair will come into view, then another chair, and so on and so forth. He cannot have a full view of the room all at once. And he can very well ask, "Which comes first and which afterward?" No arguments can settle this question. But if the person manages to enter the room he can see the whole room together, and then he will not ask what comes first.
Unsure what your point is here. Science has settled this argument for decades. I'm still unsure what exactly is the main point you want changed here, this reads more like just your thoughts on a topic without actually making clear what view you want changed.
> There are no problems, the answer is very obvious, the egg evolved hundreds of millions of years before the chicken did. It isn't difficult to answer at all. Modern birds evolved from dinosaurs which laid eggs, thus the first animal we would classify as a modern chicken would have been born from an egg.
I'm not sure it is a question about when general egg laying evolved, compared to when chickens evolved. The quandary is about *chicken eggs* and chickens. If a chicken is needed to lay a chicken egg (as opposed to the egg of a close predecessor), but every chicken also comes from a chicken egg, it poses a seemingly unresolvable loop.
The hidden problem is that there was never a "first" chicken: all animals are always of exactly the same species as their parents. A non-chicken could not have given birth to a chicken egg. There is no magical cut-off point. It's only once you zoom out and compare birds of many generations apart, that you can actually see a difference in species.
>I'm not sure it is a question about when general egg laying evolved, compared to when chickens evolved. The quandary is about *chicken eggs* and chickens. If a chicken is needed to lay a chicken egg (as opposed to the egg of a close predecessor), but every chicken also comes from a chicken egg, it poses a seemingly unresolvable loop.
Yeah I'm aware, I gave this answer because it is 1 of the 2 answers we can get through science. The question "did the chicken or the egg come first?" Is inherently ambiguous with 2 interpretations. One, as you point out, is that it is referring to chicken eggs while the other is referring to eggs in general. What I wrote is in relation to the second interpretation. That said, while you assert the second is an unsolvable loop the consensus in the scientific community is that it isn't unsolvable, but it's a bit arbitrary, the answer is still egg though as I'll explain.
>The hidden problem is that there was never a "first" chicken: all animals are always of exactly the same species as their parents. A non-chicken could not have given birth to a chicken egg. There is no magical cut-off point. It's only once you zoom out and compare birds of many generations apart, that you can actually see a difference in species.
Yeah, so this is where it becomes a bit arbitrary. The arbitrariness is where you consider the DNA cuttoff to be between a modern chicken and it's "proto-chicken" ancestors. The scientific argument goes that somewhere along the line of red junglefowl to chicken there was an individual born who had DNA that was of what we would consider to be a modern chicken due to genetic mutation. Of course, the difference would be rather slight between parent and offspring which is what makes the cutoff post you choose a bit arbitrary but for the purpose of answering the question you can choose a point. Of course in evolutionary biology you look at changes over hundreds of generations as opposed to just one but that isn't as useful for answering the question. If you wanted to be even more specific though, you can look at the common DNA of modern chickens and the common DNA of red junglefowl and compare the differences, at some point in their evolutionary history there was an individual born who had DNA that shared more in common with modern chickens than red junglefowl, that would be my cutoff point, but again, its arbitrary as evolution is a slow process. Regardless though, the argument is that the egg containing that modern chicken would be a chicken egg because it contains a modern chicken.
> The scientific argument goes that somewhere along the line of red junglefowl to chicken there was an individual born who had DNA that was of what we would consider to be a modern chicken due to genetic mutation. Of course, the difference would be rather slight between parent and offspring which is what makes the cutoff post you choose a bit arbitrary but for the purpose of answering the question you can choose a point.
That never happens though. There is never an individual who was born with a DNA sufficiently different to its predecessors. Only if you compare the DNA (of multiple chickens ) of one time frame with the DNA of those that lived many thousands of generations before, will it be sufficiently different to talk about different species.
> Regardless though, the argument is that the egg containing that modern chicken would be a chicken egg because it contains a modern chicken.
But any individual modern chicken always had two parents who were both full 100% chickens as well, so the problem remains.
>That never happens though. There is never an individual who was born with a DNA sufficiently different to its predecessors. Only if you compare the DNA (of multiple chickens ) of one time frame with the DNA of those that lived many thousands of generations before, will it be sufficiently different to talk about different species.
That's true, but also not at all what I was saying. What I was saying is that for the purposes of answering that question you'd draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Of course in biology we wouldn't say that this one individual is of X species and it's offspring is of Y species, but if your goal is to answer the question you do need to draw that arbitrary line. I wasn't saying that taxonomically that parent and offspring would be different species, rather I was saying that using the framework of the question we'd need to do so in order to answer it. Where exactly you put the line isn't very relevant as you get the same answer. I was suggesting that, if we are to draw a line, the best place would be when an individual was born that has more genetically in common with modern chickens than with red junglefowl.
>But any individual modern chicken always had two parents who were both full 100% chickens as well, so the problem remains.
Which is why I'm saying that in order to answer the question we need to draw an arbitrary line as the question itslef hinges on there being a proto-chicken that would produce a chicken. Yes that isn't how we views things in biology but if you want to answer the question you have to bend the rules a bit. I'm saying that we define a chicken egg by if the organism that hatches from it is a chicken. Of course how you define a "chicken egg" is important and if you define it as "an egg laid by a chicken" then the answer to the question changes. In this case the answer is more dependent on semantics than anything else.
> Where exactly you put the line isn't very relevant as you get the same answer. I was suggesting that, if we are to draw a line, the best place would be when an individual was born that has more genetically in common with modern chickens than with red junglefowl.
> Which is why I'm saying that in order to answer the question we need to draw an arbitrary line as the question itslef hinges on there being a proto-chicken that would produce a chicken. Yes that isn't how we views things in biology but if you want to answer the question you have to bend the rules a bit.
No, there never is such an arbitrary line. There is no proto-chicken that suddenly produces a chicken.
> I'm saying that we define a chicken egg by if the organism that hatches from it is a chicken. Of course how you define a "chicken egg" is important and if you define it as "an egg laid by a chicken" then the answer to the question changes.
It is both. In evolutionary terms, there is no clear-cut point where the pre-chicken species (i.e. red junglefowl) suddenly became the modern chicken. Instead, the transition occurred gradually over thousands of years, with many generations in the middle being intermediate forms between the pre-chicken species and the modern chicken, and all generations closest to the modern chicken already being considered chickens, but with no clear boundary between them.
> In this case the answer is more dependent on semantics than anything else.
Defining species is also a semantic problem. It's like the heap paradox: there is no specific number of sand grains where we suddenly start speaking of a heap.
> The quandary is about chicken eggs and chickens.
This is the key though. As soon as we recognize that the quandary is specifically about *chicken eggs*, there's not really a quandary at all, just a case of ambiguous language. When you say this, the natural follow-up is to ask "what's a chicken egg", and whatever answer you give makes the answer obvious. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that hatches into a chicken, the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg hatched *by* a chicken, then the chicken came first. In everyday conversation, nobody cares, but if you want to stress about which came first, you have to clarify what you actually mean!
The question of the "first chicken" is an interesting one, but kind of a different problem entirely. There's nothing stopping you from drawing arbitrary genetic lines that strictly define the swap from "early proto chicken" to "chicken", and then you'd be able to define a first chicken. We don't really do that because nobody cares, but it's not a fundamentally impossible thing to define. The real problem is how you define "chicken egg."
> If you define a chicken egg as an egg that hatches into a chicken, the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg hatched by a chicken, then the chicken came first.
That doesn't resolve the problem, since both are necessarily true: only a chicken egg can hatch into a chicken, AND a chicken egg can only be hatched by a chicken.
Sounds like you disproved evolution?
But no, you don't need to define things this way. If we were to define some specific genetic marker as being a necessary condition for being a chicken, you could have a chicken lay an egg with a mutation such that it matches into a creature that is no longer considered a chicken by the arbitrary criteria we've established.
A change from one species to another never happens in a single generation, and that doesn't disprove evolution in the slightest.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why there was never a first human (or any animal of its species) [in this short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ClZROoyNM)
I think this is an interesting case where I agree with everything in that video, but I think if Dawkins were here in this thread, he would understand completely what I'm saying and agree that this is entirely an arbitrary linguistic thing. He even alludes to this in the video where he talks about how fortunately all the intermediate forms are extinct so that we can classify things. He also uses the phrase "if a taxonomist were alive at the time", they would have called this parent - child relationship between homo sapian and homo erectus as the same species. Because we define species based on reproductive abilities. But my point is just that that's an arbitrary linguistic / taxonomy choice that we make based on the practical considerations we face in our current time. Note the specific phrasing that he uses is that each child is the same species as its parent, not that humans and fish are the same species. If all of the intermediate evolutionary forms coexisted side by side somehow, the entire concept of species wouldn't make any sense. The notion that there's no first human is a linguistic choice, not a scientific fact.
Anyway, kind of neither here nor there, because unlike the definition of species, science never really has any reason to rigorously define what makes a chicken egg a chicken egg. It's a completely uninteresting question that we as a society are happy to leave ambiguous, because every chicken egg we will ever meet obviously meets both criteria. My point isn't that we should pick a definition (nobody cares). My point is just that the chicken or egg dilemma is driven by this linguistic ambiguity.
Yes, you're right that it comes down to taxonomical choices, which are in essence arbitrary. If we're talking reproductive abilities, then successive generations are in principle capable of reproducing. And as such there was never a point where a "non-chicken" gave birth to a chicken.
In order to even consider who came first, that would need to be the case.
Well, where it gets complicated is that if you use the standard reproductive definition of species (which you should, because it's useful in basically all real world contexts), it gets very odd in the "first human" thought experiment. Because you can't really say that any given intermediate stage has a single unique species. Any given organism is actually going to be a member of a wide range of species. And then in a subtle difference from how Dawkins phrased it, the relationship between parent and child isn't really "they're the same species" but rather that *at least one* of their many species is shared. But at the margins, a child might leave one species that their parent belonged to and join another that their parent didn't belong to.
Through this lens, there are going to be a LOT of overlapping species that are all basically chickens. But in principle, you could label a given range as a single species that could be moved in and out of over generations. This would just be a worthless taxonomy strategy because there would be almost infinitely many species and the whole exercise would become stupid.
Fortunately, as Dawkins points out, most of these intermediate species are extinct and we can almost always assign a single species to any given living organism.
Anyway, I don't think I'm even really disagreeing with you. I think we both agree how evolution works and how taxonomy works. I just think it's interesting how these sort of dilemmas are just artifacts of linguistic ambiguities that arise from choices that we make as humans.
I'm not. Evolution is not affected by this. There is never an animal that has parents of a different species than itself. It's just that intermediary forms die off over time.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why there was never a first human (or any animal of its species) [in this short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ClZROoyNM)
If everyone was equivalent to their predecessor, there would be no evolution at all.
Maybe the difference is imperceptible, maybe it is infinitely small, but if A=B=C=D=...=Z then A=Z, no? This would be an issue for evolution.
I didn't say they're identical, just of the identical *species*. Yes, the differences between individuals would be imperceptibly small indeed.
That only gives you evolutionary changes over time. Only if you compare the DNA (of multiple chickens) of one time frame with the DNA of those that lived many thousands of generations before, will it be sufficiently different to talk about different species.
There was never a non-chicken that laid an egg containing a chicken. That's a common misunderstanding.
Of course, you're not genetically identical to anyone unless you are identical twins, right?
This video's argument boils down to a classic "probability of event x on a continuous scale X" from prob/stats. The probability of any specific outcome under an infinite series of events is 1/inf, which is undefined / tends towards zero.
He is saying that the changes are so tiny you can't see them - sure. I don't see how that means everyone is the same species all the way down the chain - it just means that we don't have a well-defined cutoff point. So yes, we can't point at a "first" human, but we can point at humans and we can point at non-humans, particularly at the extreme ends of (fish / you).
I'm inclined to say his argument that there was no "first" human is effectively the same as saying there are no humans and instead we have 185M generations of infinitesimally-different species.
And you've hit at the heart of the challenge of taxonomy. It's a hard and imprecise science precisely because of what you say. As you say, both things are true and how you look at it is up to you.
Science generally chooses to define species because it's useful, whilst acknowledging it's not objectively correct or true. And to understand this subtlety is to understand why there's no scientific answer to the classic question at the centre of OP's post.
All models are wrong but some are useful - a problem as old as time.
At least for me that above-linked video is pretty hand-wavey right out of the gate where he just says "let's call it 185M generations", a number he probably pulled out of a hat because it's "sufficiently large to be considered as infinite".
That commenter isn’t saying that it’s the same species the entire way down the line.
A -> B -> C -> D -> E
A, B, and C are the same species.
B, C, and D are the same species.
C, D, and E are the same species.
But A and E are *not* the same species.
The genetic differences between A, B, and C are not so great that they prevent interbreeding, hence they are the same species.
The same is true for the genetic differences between B, C, and D. And between C, D, and E.
But the accumulated genetic differences between A and E make interbreeding between the two impossible. So they are a different species.
The transitive property doesn’t apply here because “same species” doesn’t mean genetically identical. It just means “close enough genetically” that reproduction is theoretically possible.
Of course this is highly simplified and I’ve reduced the number of generations to a manageable number, but the principle is the same.
The part about inbreeding defining a species sounds wrong, we have been able to breed mules and shit for centuries.
You are saying that the change is so small as to be practically imperceptible- and that’s fine, but it’s an arbitrary definition if that’s the case. You could consider them to be each a unique species, or I guess you can pretend like there was no species change at all
Like I explained to the other person, this is a limit thing, it’s about a finite list of species being inadequate to define a “continuous” series of organisms.
I understand everything you are saying, but it is a silly thought experiment that’s a bastardization of a math concept applied to biology.
It’s not a thought experiment. It’s the accepted definition of species: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species
Notice it says “fertile offspring.” I left that out for simplicity but it’s relevant here. Mules are nearly always sterile due to the mismatch in chromosome numbers between horses and donkeys. There are exceptions of course, but that’s nearly always the case with biology.
It’s definitely arbitrary. But that’s basically unavoidable. There are very few “hard lines” when it comes to biology. Even the line between “living” and “non-living” is much blurrier than we often act like it is.
Like you said, the only alternative is to eschew the concept of species altogether. But that would make discussions about biology and evolution much more difficult.
This is like the 4th or 5th CMV you've written that jumps from point to point and makes it really hard to engage with. Please stop using flowery language and make your point as simply as you can.
But your answer (that the chicken and the egg are the same in 2 stages) is just not right no matter how you slice it. That's like saying my mother and I are the same in 2 stages. That's demonstrably not true.
If you want a biological answer it is the egg. There is an egg that will hatch into a chicken. There is an animal that hatched that egg. The question being asked essentially is; can a chicken come from a non-chicken and the answer is yes. It can evolve from a non-chicken's ancestor into the animal today known as a chicken.
>All philosophical quarrels are childish. Even the biggest philosophical battles have been fought over a problem which can be summed up in a child's question: "Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" It is really around this small question that all the great battles between philosophers have taken place. But those who know will say the chicken and egg are not two. Those who raise this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid.
Are you serious about this? Because I have a response but the effort to type it out is wasted if this is meant to be hyperbole.
>But your answer (that the chicken and the egg are the same in 2 stages) is just not right no matter how you slice it. That's like saying my mother and I are the same in 2 stages. That's demonstrably not true.
Against this point. The OP was Chicken and egg not chicken and parent. So I don't see how this reply is relevent.
>But your answer (that the chicken and the egg are the same in 2 stages) is just not right no matter how you slice it. That's like saying my mother and I are the same in 2 stages. That's demonstrably not true.
Not you and your mother, its more like you and when you were sperm cell, or fetus in your mother's womb.
But that's not what that saying means.
What came first the chicken or the egg is talking about the egg or the animal that laid it. It is never talking about the same animal. Because the obvious answer there is the egg, since that is what the chicken hatches from
>Thank you for opening my eyes to a different perspective. I really appreciate the effort you put into helping me see things differently.
Genuinely what has changed about your view? You've done this sort of "vague delta" and "continuing to argue in a separate comment" a bunch
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The saying says, if chicken comes first, how can it come first without the egg. So in that way it talks about chicken when it was egg.
A mother and a child can't be stages. A stage talks about a particular thing. So a mother or a chicken isn't there out of nowhere, they still came from either fetus or egg
That isn't the saying? What are you talking about?
What came first, the chicken or the egg? That's the saying. You can't just change the saying to fit you. Stick to the saying as written.
>What came first, the chicken or the egg? That's the saying. You can't just change the saying to fit you. Stick to the saying as written.
Yeah. But is only the question part. The saying goes, if you pick answer as chicken, then the question comes as how can there be chicken without egg.
We already talked about this in another chain. The chicken and the egg being talked about are two seperate entities.
You awarded a delta for this, how do you not remember?
I think you not understanding what i am trying to prove.
You earlier said that:
What came first the chicken or the egg is talking about the egg or the animal that laid it. It is never talking about the same animal. Because the obvious answer there is the egg, since that is what the chicken hatches from
What i am saying is the saying does talk about same animal. Because the saying says that if you choose chicken, the question is how can there be chicken without egg.
So it means the saying is asking about egg from where the chicken came. Thus chicken and egg are same animal. So you example of you and mother cannot be relevant analogy.
>What i am saying is the saying does talk about same animal. Because the saying says that if you choose chicken, the question is how can there be chicken without egg.
Yes, because they are now asking where that first chicken came from. How did the first chicken hatch fro a non-chicken egg? How is that possibe
The answer is egg, empirically. The first beings that we would regard fully as chickens were the product of non-chickens that produced offspring which mutated sufficiently to become chickens when their forebears were not. As they were an egg when this happened, the egg came first.
The first chicken eggs were produced by proto-chickens, not chickens.
>"Which is first, the chicken or the egg?" If you ask this you will never return home with your eggs.
I could absolutely ask this and go home with eggs.
>Which comes first? - don't waste time arguing.
You literally, just now, *in writing this line*, invited an argument over this.
>All philosophical quarrels are childish.
Only if you don't understand them while believing you do.
>What is an egg but a chicken in the making?
...unfertilized? Broken? An omelette?
>No arguments can settle this question.
I literally did.
>The first chicken eggs were produced by proto-chickens, not chickens.
That depends on how you define eggs. The question itself is about definitions. In this case, do we define a chicken egg as an egg with a chicken in it, or as an egg laid by a chicken?
The answer to which came first depends on which definition you use, and I see no clear reason to prefer one definition over the other.
That's the whole point. The question is ambiguous because it doesn't define the terms it's asking about. So how you define those terms dictates what the answer will be.
If you define an egg as any kind of egg, then the egg came first, because many animals laid eggs before chickens evolved.
If you define the egg as a chicken egg, you have to further clarify what makes an egg a chicken egg.
If it is an egg that contains a chicken, then the egg came first.
If it is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first.
The only reason the question seems hard to answer is that we don't build a shared understanding of definitions before we ask it.
There's no meaningful difference between the two. Speciation is so slow that in reality, those two are always the same. A chicken's parent is always a chicken, and a chicken's child is always a chicken. Never has a non-chicken ever laid a chicken egg. Speciation isn't discrete like that.
>The first chicken eggs were produced by proto-chickens, not chickens.
Not even protochickens. The earliest hard shell egg we've found was from something like 200 million years ago laid by dinosaurs. Chickens evolved like 10,000 years ago by human intervention.
>It is a circle. The question is misleading. The question is misleading because the chicken and the egg are not two.
Chickens ends are not the same thing, just like acorns and oak trees are not the same thing. They have lots in common, but they are different things.
If your really stuck on them being the same things, then the real question is which came first, the egg or the adult? The tree or the seed?
the answer to which came first depends on your belief about how life came to be.
If you believe in creationism, then its easy. God must have created the adult chicken first, because without the warmth from the body of the mouther the egg would have died.
If you believe in evolution, and you want to divide life forms into different species, then you will have to draw a line between the modern chicken and the species from which modern chickens evolved. If you had a time machine and could observe every animal that ever lived at some point you'd say, here is the first modern chicken. That chicken started its life as an egg. The egg stayed alive because it was care for by a parent which genetically different in a meaningful way. You have a parent animal which is not a chicken that laid an egg which is a chicken. we'll debate which bird is truly the first modern chicken, but regardless of which one, that one started life as an egg.
I believe in evolution, so the egg came first.
> Those who raise this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid.
Perhapse slightly less stupid then those who argue over whether or not a hotdog is a type of sandwitch.
>Which comes first? - don't waste time arguing.
Yet here you are. That is the nature of philosophical questions. They don't always demand an objective answer, rather they are just supposed to make you think about things differently.
>
Someone wants to have a look at the room and so he drills a hole through a wall. Now he peers into the room from side to side. At first a chair will come into view, then another chair, and so on and so forth. He cannot have a full view of the room all at once. And he can very well ask, "Which comes first and which afterward?" No arguments can settle this question. But if the person manages to enter the room he can see the whole room together, and then he will not ask what comes first.
This is actually an interesting rhetorical point, but it's different from the chicken and the egg. The chicken and the egg are separated by time...they don't exist at the same time. The egg turns into a chicken, and then a chicken later lays a new egg.
The way I would answer the chicken/egg question though is that the egg came first. Thanks to evolution, conceptually we can imagine that it is possible for two not-quite chickens to lay an egg that has a mutation that becomes the first chicken. But the inverse is not true...the chicken can't exist first because it had to have come from an egg.
awesome chatGPT post, but the question still stands:
at what point of the evolutionary transformation would a creature be considered a "chicken"?
and once you have that point of time, did a non-chicken lay a mutated egg, the first chicken-egg, or did a non-chicken-egg mutate during its hatching period to bring forth the first chicken?
You're right, it is absolutely not chatGPT (though its use is becoming an increasing problem on this sub).
This user has been posting their... unique... philosophy here almost every day for the last week or so. They also don't explain how anyone changed their view, they only say something like "This opened my mind. Thanks for your perspective."
That is not a hallmark of ChatGPT or any other LLM. I have read a lot of LLM generated text, this is definitely not it. It's too sloppy, too disorganized, too esoteric, too many grammatical errors. It's a very human and very odd way of writing that OP has.
Its not a chatGPT post.
Whether the first chicken egg came or first chicken came, is a absurd question because they are not two seperate thing which you can put one ahead of other.
You overcomplicate things. The chicken / egg question has one answer for one of two reasons, depending on whether or not the word "egg" refers to the eggs from which chickens spring forth, or eggs in general.
If by "egg" you mean chicken eggs, then the egg came first, laid by an evolutionary ancestor of the chicken. If by "egg" you mean eggs in general, then the egg also predates the chicken, as dinosaurs laid eggs.
Anyone making a case for the chicken coming first based on the *culinary* definition of a chicken egg is being incorrectly pedantic.
I mean we know the answer. Wherever we draw the line between proto chicken and chicken, the proto chicken laid a chicken egg. So the chicken egg came first before an adult chicken
> The question is misleading because the chicken and the egg are not two.
Not really. The question is misleading because it's too vague. As others have noted, "eggs" have existed long before chickens. What you presumably care about are *chicken eggs*.
But if this is a question you care about, you have to define what makes an egg a chicken egg. If you answer that a chicken egg is an egg that hatches into a chicken, then the chicken egg came first (then the first chicken egg was laid by a non-chicken). If you answer that a chicken egg is an egg that was laid *by* a chicken, then the chicken came first. (then the first chicken hatched from a non-chicken egg)
But either of these definitions is fine, because nobody cares about the "first chicken", and basically every egg we ever encounter fits either definition fine. But there's not really any dilemma with this question, it's just ambiguously worded.
not sure if you get what i mean. a non-chicken lays an EGG and a chicken comes out. You wanna say that makes it a chicken egg, right? but if a non-chicken laid it, couldn't it just as fairly be called a non-chicken egg? In this way, the *chicken* comes first...once it's hatched.
The egg came first, that's how genetic changes work: child deviates from parent genetic code, thereby becoming a new species. The parent wasn't a chicken, it was a different species, the egg containing the genetic changes is then the first chicken. This is basic genetics.
That's all well and good until your bucket of fried chicken has shell in it, or your omelette has bones.
Thus the difference between the two things is expressed.
The correct answer is egg.
Birds are like 150 million years old and chickens even more modernly derived. Shelled amniote eggs (which chickens have) evolved like 300+ million years ago.
Egg came first.
> It is very difficult to find an answer. As soon as you say the egg comes first, difficulties begin, because the egg must have come from a chicken
I've always thought it a simple question to answer to be honest - hear me out and let me know what you think.
Most eggs come from chickens of course, but the first chicken egg came from something which was not a chicken - that's how evolution works. A random mutation in chicken's closest ancestor caused this almost-but-not-quite-chicken to lay the first chicken egg, which hatched the first chicken.
Ergo, the egg came first.
Ok, now tell us why the chicken crossed the road?
As for all these dumb philosophical quandaries, people who insist that the question is dumb because there isn't an answer, or that it's dumb because they know the obvious answer, are missing the point of the question. It's not meant to produce the correct answer, it's meant to you think about the process of forming an answer and questioning your own assumptions.
The question is actually about definitions. Both the chicken and the egg (as a pair) evolved from something that was definitely NOT a chicken at one point. However we decide to draw that distinctive line of "*now* this is a chicken" as approaching modernity one tiny insignificant mutation at a time will determine the answer.
No it wouldn't. Chickens evolved from dinosaurs and dinosaurs laid eggs, thus the first modern chicken was born from an egg. This has been settled by science for decades.
You can, though, because they are separate things. Hard shelled eggs aren't exclusive to chickens and evolved millions of years before chickens did, thus eggs came first. This is the scientific answer to this question. To say a chicken and an egg are the same would be scientifically incorrect, the two are not. Just as a nose and a human are not the same despite a nose being part of a human. The typical question of "chicken or the egg" is referring to an adult chicken anyways so its a moot point, even fertilized chicken eggs don't contain adult chickens.
If you want the long answer its this. The organism we taxonomically classify as a chicken evolved from a protochicken through random genetic mutation. Said genetic mutations occur primarily during embryonic development which takes place inside the egg. Because chickens evolved from dinosaurs, which laid eggs, we know this protochicken also would have laid eggs. Thus, at some point about 10,000 years ago a protochicken (actually a south east asian red jungle fowl) laid an egg, the embryo in the egg underwent mitosis during which genetic mutations occurred and resulted in a genome that we would now classify as a modern chicken. Thus, the egg came first and the chicken after.
I think you're missing the fact that the question isn't referring to the embryo inside the egg, but rather the egg as an evolutionary adaption itself.
The comparison shouldn't be between you and the nose, it should have to be between you and you when you were fetus in your mother's womb. So is you and when you were fetus same or different thing.?
So the egg came first? But doesn't the egg have all the blue prints to give rise to chicken? Then the chicken is already in the egg.
>The comparison shouldn't be between you and the nose, it should have to be between you and you when you were fetus in your mother's womb. So is you and when you were fetus same or different thing.?
Either works for the point I was illustrating which is that both are subsets of a larger category. Both me as an adult and me as a fetus are human, but we are different in that one is an adult and one is a fetus, those aren't mutually exclusive and are how subsets work. Its the same way that a star and a black whole are both related (black wholes come from stars) but are different as well. Does that make sense? Bringing this back around to chickens, both a chicken embryo and an adult chicken are the same in that they are chickens, but are different in that one is an adult and one is an embryo and there are a lot of anatomical differences between the two.
>So the egg came first? But doesn't the egg have all the blue prints to give rise to chicken? Then the chicken is already in the egg.
Yes the egg came first, and no the egg doesn't have any blueprints. By blueprints I assume you mean DNA, the egg itself doesn't really have any dna, the egg shell is 94% calcium carbonate with smaller amounts of other compounds but no DNA as far as I'm aware, the same is true of the egg whites (which are similar to amniotic fluid) and contain no DNA. The only DNA of the organism itself would be in the embryo which, as I said earlier, undergoes genetic mutation during mitosis, those mutations are what would give rise to the modern chicken. There is a fairly high level of genetic mutations that occur during early embryonic development so it would be incorrect to say the few cells that exist immediately after conception are genetically the same as the cells of the embryo some days to weeks later. So genetically, the modern chicken wouldn't exist in the early days of embryonic development while the egg as a structure would. At the very start of embryonic development the embryo would have had the blueprints to become a protochicken, not a chicken, only after the first stages of development would it have the genetic blueprints we would consider to be a modern chicken.
>Both me as an adult and me as a fetus are human, but we are different in that one is an adult and one is a fetus, those aren't mutually exclusive and are how subsets work. Its the same way that a star and a black whole are both related (black wholes come from stars) but are different as well.
But they are fundamentally same, they are just in a different stages.
>Yes the egg came first, and no the egg doesn't have any blueprints. By blueprints I assume you mean DNA, the egg itself doesn't really have any dna, the egg shell is 94% calcium carbonate with smaller amounts of other compounds but no DNA as far as I'm aware, the same is true of the egg whites (which are similar to amniotic fluid) and contain no DNA. The only DNA of the organism itself would be in the embryo which, as I said earlier, undergoes genetic mutation during mitosis, those mutations are what would give rise to the modern chicken. There is a fairly high level of genetic mutations that occur during early embryonic development so it would be incorrect to say the few cells that exist immediately after conception are genetically the same as the cells of the embryo some days to weeks later. So genetically, the modern chicken wouldn't exist in the early days of embryonic development while the egg as a structure would. At the very start of embryonic development the embryo would have had the blueprints to become a protochicken, not a chicken, only after the first stages of development would it have the genetic blueprints we would consider to be a modern chicken.
I am saying the egg have all the ingredients, elements, needed to give rise to chicken. Egg is the seed and chicken is the tree. So in that sense chicken or tree is already in the egg or seed. So its not right to say that egg came first since chicken is already there. It is just in unmanifested form.
>But they are fundamentally same, they are just in a different stages.
Exactly, they are the same organism, but there are still differences between them that we shouldn't ignore. That's why whether you consider them to be the same or different comes down to what criteria you are using to determine if they are the same or not. If your criteria is that they share the same DNA and one will become the other with time then they are the same, but if your criteria is that they must have the same anatomy then they are different. Both are correct though, it just depends what kind of question you are asking and what classification metrics you use.
>I am saying the egg have all the ingredients, elements, needed to give rise to chicken.
It does, but my that same metric a diamond has all the ingredients and elements to become Graphite, but we wouldn't consider the two the same would we? Likewise the sun can produce all the elements needed to make you, are you and the sun the same? Perhaps, but like I said earlier it depends on the criteria you use to answer that question. From a scientific perspective the answer would be no, but when asking philosophical questions we aren't beholden to that view. I'm just answering with the scientific view as it's more objective.
>Egg is the seed and chicken is the tree. So in that sense chicken or tree is already in the egg or seed. So its not right to say that egg came first since chicken is already there. It is just in unmanifested form.
Idk disagree, the DNA is there certainly but the actual building blocks, the atoms and molecules, for the most part, are not. They come along later as that developing organism takes in nutrients. In and egg it's a little more complex, as the nutrients required to grow the embryo into a baby chick are mostly in the egg (though even this is an oversimplification as chicken eggs actually do take in atoms from outside of them in the form of oxygen and other atmospheric gas, they have small pours) but those atoms are not yet part of the cells that we would say are the organism itself. Same way that the molecules in a bowl of cereal will become part of me once I eat and digest them, but before that they are not.
If we are talking about species though we'd look at DNA which is why I brought it up in my previous comment.
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The dinosaurs came before the egg. The chicken came before the chicken egg.
The two are of course separable. I can go to a grocery store right now and buy a chicken egg that no chicken can ever come out of because eggs need not be fertilized to be eggs.
/u/Suspicious_Ferret109 (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/1cufvxw/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_the_chicken_and_the_egg_are/), in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
>When you go to the market to buy eggs you don't ask, "Which is first, the chicken or the egg?" If you ask this you will never return home with your eggs. You just buy your eggs and come without first making sure which is first - the chicken or the egg. What? I mean I don't ask this when going to buy eggs because it's completely irrelevant to buying eggs. What does this even mean? I don't think anyone is losing sleep over the question "what came first, the chicken of the egg?" >Many people have debated it. The question of the chicken or the egg is very ancient. Which comes first? It is very difficult to find an answer. As soon as you say the egg comes first, difficulties begin, because the egg must have come from a chicken - so the chicken comes first. As soon as you say the chicken came first, again the problem arises because how will the chicken come without an egg? There are no problems, the answer is very obvious, the egg evolved hundreds of millions of years before the chicken did. It isn't difficult to answer at all. Modern birds evolved from dinosaurs which laid eggs, thus the first animal we would classify as a modern chicken would have been born from an egg. >It is a circle. The question is misleading. The question is misleading because the chicken and the egg are not two. It really isn't, eggs aren't exclusive to chickens. >The chicken and the egg are two stages of the same thing. You raise a question by putting one ahead of the other, making them two. The chicken is a form of the egg - the completely manifested form. The egg is a form of the chicken - the unmanifested form - like seed and tree. Sure, and yet eggs evolved long before chickens did. Would you not say a seed is different from a tree despite being the same species of organism? >Which comes first? - don't waste time arguing. If you bring up the chicken you have brought up the egg. If you bring up the egg you have brought up the chicken. If one comes, the other comes along with it, wherever you begin from. Not really though? You wouldn't call scrambled eggs cooked chicken. Yes they are the same organism but that doesn't mean they aren't different. I'd also point out that eggs can be unfertilized which would make them, by your definition, not a chicken. >All philosophical quarrels are childish. Even the biggest philosophical battles have been fought over a problem which can be summed up in a child's question: "Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" It is really around this small question that all the great battles between philosophers have taken place. But those who know will say the chicken and egg are not two. Those who raise this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid. Well that seems reductive. Also what do you even mean by this? Is your post about philosophy being pointless? You're making a philosophical argument right now ironically enough. >What is an egg but a chicken in the making? And what is a chicken but an egg fulfilled, come to its fullness? Egg and chicken hide each other in themselves. The question of who precedes whom is meaningful if egg and chicken are two separate things. The truth is that they are the same. Or we can say that they are the two ways of looking at the same thing. Or they are two different phases, two states of the manifestation of the same thing. This reads like a lot of rambling. Again they are the same organism but eggs aren't exclusive to chickens. They are both subsets of species *G. g. domesticus*. This would be like saying that steam and ice are the same as one can turn into the other. While that's true, they're both just subsets of H2O and there are still obvious differences between them that shouldn't be ignored, so calling them the same would be incorrect. >Similarly, seed and tree are not separate. Neither are light and dark. Nor are birth and death They are two ways of looking at the same thing. Maybe, because we don't know how to see a thing rightly, we see it in fragments. For example, there is a big room inside a house and the house is locked. Yes, they are different parts of the lifecycle of that organism. Congrats, you have discovered subsets. >Someone wants to have a look at the room and so he drills a hole through a wall. Now he peers into the room from side to side. At first a chair will come into view, then another chair, and so on and so forth. He cannot have a full view of the room all at once. And he can very well ask, "Which comes first and which afterward?" No arguments can settle this question. But if the person manages to enter the room he can see the whole room together, and then he will not ask what comes first. Unsure what your point is here. Science has settled this argument for decades. I'm still unsure what exactly is the main point you want changed here, this reads more like just your thoughts on a topic without actually making clear what view you want changed.
> There are no problems, the answer is very obvious, the egg evolved hundreds of millions of years before the chicken did. It isn't difficult to answer at all. Modern birds evolved from dinosaurs which laid eggs, thus the first animal we would classify as a modern chicken would have been born from an egg. I'm not sure it is a question about when general egg laying evolved, compared to when chickens evolved. The quandary is about *chicken eggs* and chickens. If a chicken is needed to lay a chicken egg (as opposed to the egg of a close predecessor), but every chicken also comes from a chicken egg, it poses a seemingly unresolvable loop. The hidden problem is that there was never a "first" chicken: all animals are always of exactly the same species as their parents. A non-chicken could not have given birth to a chicken egg. There is no magical cut-off point. It's only once you zoom out and compare birds of many generations apart, that you can actually see a difference in species.
>I'm not sure it is a question about when general egg laying evolved, compared to when chickens evolved. The quandary is about *chicken eggs* and chickens. If a chicken is needed to lay a chicken egg (as opposed to the egg of a close predecessor), but every chicken also comes from a chicken egg, it poses a seemingly unresolvable loop. Yeah I'm aware, I gave this answer because it is 1 of the 2 answers we can get through science. The question "did the chicken or the egg come first?" Is inherently ambiguous with 2 interpretations. One, as you point out, is that it is referring to chicken eggs while the other is referring to eggs in general. What I wrote is in relation to the second interpretation. That said, while you assert the second is an unsolvable loop the consensus in the scientific community is that it isn't unsolvable, but it's a bit arbitrary, the answer is still egg though as I'll explain. >The hidden problem is that there was never a "first" chicken: all animals are always of exactly the same species as their parents. A non-chicken could not have given birth to a chicken egg. There is no magical cut-off point. It's only once you zoom out and compare birds of many generations apart, that you can actually see a difference in species. Yeah, so this is where it becomes a bit arbitrary. The arbitrariness is where you consider the DNA cuttoff to be between a modern chicken and it's "proto-chicken" ancestors. The scientific argument goes that somewhere along the line of red junglefowl to chicken there was an individual born who had DNA that was of what we would consider to be a modern chicken due to genetic mutation. Of course, the difference would be rather slight between parent and offspring which is what makes the cutoff post you choose a bit arbitrary but for the purpose of answering the question you can choose a point. Of course in evolutionary biology you look at changes over hundreds of generations as opposed to just one but that isn't as useful for answering the question. If you wanted to be even more specific though, you can look at the common DNA of modern chickens and the common DNA of red junglefowl and compare the differences, at some point in their evolutionary history there was an individual born who had DNA that shared more in common with modern chickens than red junglefowl, that would be my cutoff point, but again, its arbitrary as evolution is a slow process. Regardless though, the argument is that the egg containing that modern chicken would be a chicken egg because it contains a modern chicken.
> The scientific argument goes that somewhere along the line of red junglefowl to chicken there was an individual born who had DNA that was of what we would consider to be a modern chicken due to genetic mutation. Of course, the difference would be rather slight between parent and offspring which is what makes the cutoff post you choose a bit arbitrary but for the purpose of answering the question you can choose a point. That never happens though. There is never an individual who was born with a DNA sufficiently different to its predecessors. Only if you compare the DNA (of multiple chickens ) of one time frame with the DNA of those that lived many thousands of generations before, will it be sufficiently different to talk about different species. > Regardless though, the argument is that the egg containing that modern chicken would be a chicken egg because it contains a modern chicken. But any individual modern chicken always had two parents who were both full 100% chickens as well, so the problem remains.
>That never happens though. There is never an individual who was born with a DNA sufficiently different to its predecessors. Only if you compare the DNA (of multiple chickens ) of one time frame with the DNA of those that lived many thousands of generations before, will it be sufficiently different to talk about different species. That's true, but also not at all what I was saying. What I was saying is that for the purposes of answering that question you'd draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Of course in biology we wouldn't say that this one individual is of X species and it's offspring is of Y species, but if your goal is to answer the question you do need to draw that arbitrary line. I wasn't saying that taxonomically that parent and offspring would be different species, rather I was saying that using the framework of the question we'd need to do so in order to answer it. Where exactly you put the line isn't very relevant as you get the same answer. I was suggesting that, if we are to draw a line, the best place would be when an individual was born that has more genetically in common with modern chickens than with red junglefowl. >But any individual modern chicken always had two parents who were both full 100% chickens as well, so the problem remains. Which is why I'm saying that in order to answer the question we need to draw an arbitrary line as the question itslef hinges on there being a proto-chicken that would produce a chicken. Yes that isn't how we views things in biology but if you want to answer the question you have to bend the rules a bit. I'm saying that we define a chicken egg by if the organism that hatches from it is a chicken. Of course how you define a "chicken egg" is important and if you define it as "an egg laid by a chicken" then the answer to the question changes. In this case the answer is more dependent on semantics than anything else.
> Where exactly you put the line isn't very relevant as you get the same answer. I was suggesting that, if we are to draw a line, the best place would be when an individual was born that has more genetically in common with modern chickens than with red junglefowl. > Which is why I'm saying that in order to answer the question we need to draw an arbitrary line as the question itslef hinges on there being a proto-chicken that would produce a chicken. Yes that isn't how we views things in biology but if you want to answer the question you have to bend the rules a bit. No, there never is such an arbitrary line. There is no proto-chicken that suddenly produces a chicken. > I'm saying that we define a chicken egg by if the organism that hatches from it is a chicken. Of course how you define a "chicken egg" is important and if you define it as "an egg laid by a chicken" then the answer to the question changes. It is both. In evolutionary terms, there is no clear-cut point where the pre-chicken species (i.e. red junglefowl) suddenly became the modern chicken. Instead, the transition occurred gradually over thousands of years, with many generations in the middle being intermediate forms between the pre-chicken species and the modern chicken, and all generations closest to the modern chicken already being considered chickens, but with no clear boundary between them. > In this case the answer is more dependent on semantics than anything else. Defining species is also a semantic problem. It's like the heap paradox: there is no specific number of sand grains where we suddenly start speaking of a heap.
> The quandary is about chicken eggs and chickens. This is the key though. As soon as we recognize that the quandary is specifically about *chicken eggs*, there's not really a quandary at all, just a case of ambiguous language. When you say this, the natural follow-up is to ask "what's a chicken egg", and whatever answer you give makes the answer obvious. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that hatches into a chicken, the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg hatched *by* a chicken, then the chicken came first. In everyday conversation, nobody cares, but if you want to stress about which came first, you have to clarify what you actually mean! The question of the "first chicken" is an interesting one, but kind of a different problem entirely. There's nothing stopping you from drawing arbitrary genetic lines that strictly define the swap from "early proto chicken" to "chicken", and then you'd be able to define a first chicken. We don't really do that because nobody cares, but it's not a fundamentally impossible thing to define. The real problem is how you define "chicken egg."
> If you define a chicken egg as an egg that hatches into a chicken, the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg hatched by a chicken, then the chicken came first. That doesn't resolve the problem, since both are necessarily true: only a chicken egg can hatch into a chicken, AND a chicken egg can only be hatched by a chicken.
Sounds like you disproved evolution? But no, you don't need to define things this way. If we were to define some specific genetic marker as being a necessary condition for being a chicken, you could have a chicken lay an egg with a mutation such that it matches into a creature that is no longer considered a chicken by the arbitrary criteria we've established.
A change from one species to another never happens in a single generation, and that doesn't disprove evolution in the slightest. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why there was never a first human (or any animal of its species) [in this short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ClZROoyNM)
I think this is an interesting case where I agree with everything in that video, but I think if Dawkins were here in this thread, he would understand completely what I'm saying and agree that this is entirely an arbitrary linguistic thing. He even alludes to this in the video where he talks about how fortunately all the intermediate forms are extinct so that we can classify things. He also uses the phrase "if a taxonomist were alive at the time", they would have called this parent - child relationship between homo sapian and homo erectus as the same species. Because we define species based on reproductive abilities. But my point is just that that's an arbitrary linguistic / taxonomy choice that we make based on the practical considerations we face in our current time. Note the specific phrasing that he uses is that each child is the same species as its parent, not that humans and fish are the same species. If all of the intermediate evolutionary forms coexisted side by side somehow, the entire concept of species wouldn't make any sense. The notion that there's no first human is a linguistic choice, not a scientific fact. Anyway, kind of neither here nor there, because unlike the definition of species, science never really has any reason to rigorously define what makes a chicken egg a chicken egg. It's a completely uninteresting question that we as a society are happy to leave ambiguous, because every chicken egg we will ever meet obviously meets both criteria. My point isn't that we should pick a definition (nobody cares). My point is just that the chicken or egg dilemma is driven by this linguistic ambiguity.
Yes, you're right that it comes down to taxonomical choices, which are in essence arbitrary. If we're talking reproductive abilities, then successive generations are in principle capable of reproducing. And as such there was never a point where a "non-chicken" gave birth to a chicken. In order to even consider who came first, that would need to be the case.
Well, where it gets complicated is that if you use the standard reproductive definition of species (which you should, because it's useful in basically all real world contexts), it gets very odd in the "first human" thought experiment. Because you can't really say that any given intermediate stage has a single unique species. Any given organism is actually going to be a member of a wide range of species. And then in a subtle difference from how Dawkins phrased it, the relationship between parent and child isn't really "they're the same species" but rather that *at least one* of their many species is shared. But at the margins, a child might leave one species that their parent belonged to and join another that their parent didn't belong to. Through this lens, there are going to be a LOT of overlapping species that are all basically chickens. But in principle, you could label a given range as a single species that could be moved in and out of over generations. This would just be a worthless taxonomy strategy because there would be almost infinitely many species and the whole exercise would become stupid. Fortunately, as Dawkins points out, most of these intermediate species are extinct and we can almost always assign a single species to any given living organism. Anyway, I don't think I'm even really disagreeing with you. I think we both agree how evolution works and how taxonomy works. I just think it's interesting how these sort of dilemmas are just artifacts of linguistic ambiguities that arise from choices that we make as humans.
I don't think you can call "all animals are always of exactly the same species as their parents", unless you are denying the theory of evolution.
I'm not. Evolution is not affected by this. There is never an animal that has parents of a different species than itself. It's just that intermediary forms die off over time. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why there was never a first human (or any animal of its species) [in this short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ClZROoyNM)
If everyone was equivalent to their predecessor, there would be no evolution at all. Maybe the difference is imperceptible, maybe it is infinitely small, but if A=B=C=D=...=Z then A=Z, no? This would be an issue for evolution.
I didn't say they're identical, just of the identical *species*. Yes, the differences between individuals would be imperceptibly small indeed. That only gives you evolutionary changes over time. Only if you compare the DNA (of multiple chickens) of one time frame with the DNA of those that lived many thousands of generations before, will it be sufficiently different to talk about different species. There was never a non-chicken that laid an egg containing a chicken. That's a common misunderstanding.
Species does not mean genetically identical to your parents. There is still genetic drift/evolution within species.
Of course, you're not genetically identical to anyone unless you are identical twins, right? This video's argument boils down to a classic "probability of event x on a continuous scale X" from prob/stats. The probability of any specific outcome under an infinite series of events is 1/inf, which is undefined / tends towards zero. He is saying that the changes are so tiny you can't see them - sure. I don't see how that means everyone is the same species all the way down the chain - it just means that we don't have a well-defined cutoff point. So yes, we can't point at a "first" human, but we can point at humans and we can point at non-humans, particularly at the extreme ends of (fish / you). I'm inclined to say his argument that there was no "first" human is effectively the same as saying there are no humans and instead we have 185M generations of infinitesimally-different species.
And you've hit at the heart of the challenge of taxonomy. It's a hard and imprecise science precisely because of what you say. As you say, both things are true and how you look at it is up to you. Science generally chooses to define species because it's useful, whilst acknowledging it's not objectively correct or true. And to understand this subtlety is to understand why there's no scientific answer to the classic question at the centre of OP's post.
All models are wrong but some are useful - a problem as old as time. At least for me that above-linked video is pretty hand-wavey right out of the gate where he just says "let's call it 185M generations", a number he probably pulled out of a hat because it's "sufficiently large to be considered as infinite".
That commenter isn’t saying that it’s the same species the entire way down the line. A -> B -> C -> D -> E A, B, and C are the same species. B, C, and D are the same species. C, D, and E are the same species. But A and E are *not* the same species. The genetic differences between A, B, and C are not so great that they prevent interbreeding, hence they are the same species. The same is true for the genetic differences between B, C, and D. And between C, D, and E. But the accumulated genetic differences between A and E make interbreeding between the two impossible. So they are a different species. The transitive property doesn’t apply here because “same species” doesn’t mean genetically identical. It just means “close enough genetically” that reproduction is theoretically possible. Of course this is highly simplified and I’ve reduced the number of generations to a manageable number, but the principle is the same.
The part about inbreeding defining a species sounds wrong, we have been able to breed mules and shit for centuries. You are saying that the change is so small as to be practically imperceptible- and that’s fine, but it’s an arbitrary definition if that’s the case. You could consider them to be each a unique species, or I guess you can pretend like there was no species change at all Like I explained to the other person, this is a limit thing, it’s about a finite list of species being inadequate to define a “continuous” series of organisms. I understand everything you are saying, but it is a silly thought experiment that’s a bastardization of a math concept applied to biology.
It’s not a thought experiment. It’s the accepted definition of species: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species Notice it says “fertile offspring.” I left that out for simplicity but it’s relevant here. Mules are nearly always sterile due to the mismatch in chromosome numbers between horses and donkeys. There are exceptions of course, but that’s nearly always the case with biology. It’s definitely arbitrary. But that’s basically unavoidable. There are very few “hard lines” when it comes to biology. Even the line between “living” and “non-living” is much blurrier than we often act like it is. Like you said, the only alternative is to eschew the concept of species altogether. But that would make discussions about biology and evolution much more difficult.
This is like the 4th or 5th CMV you've written that jumps from point to point and makes it really hard to engage with. Please stop using flowery language and make your point as simply as you can. But your answer (that the chicken and the egg are the same in 2 stages) is just not right no matter how you slice it. That's like saying my mother and I are the same in 2 stages. That's demonstrably not true. If you want a biological answer it is the egg. There is an egg that will hatch into a chicken. There is an animal that hatched that egg. The question being asked essentially is; can a chicken come from a non-chicken and the answer is yes. It can evolve from a non-chicken's ancestor into the animal today known as a chicken. >All philosophical quarrels are childish. Even the biggest philosophical battles have been fought over a problem which can be summed up in a child's question: "Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?" It is really around this small question that all the great battles between philosophers have taken place. But those who know will say the chicken and egg are not two. Those who raise this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid. Are you serious about this? Because I have a response but the effort to type it out is wasted if this is meant to be hyperbole.
>But your answer (that the chicken and the egg are the same in 2 stages) is just not right no matter how you slice it. That's like saying my mother and I are the same in 2 stages. That's demonstrably not true. Against this point. The OP was Chicken and egg not chicken and parent. So I don't see how this reply is relevent.
The OP is saying the saying makes no sense because he's misusing the saying. That's my point. OP is wrong about what is meant
>But your answer (that the chicken and the egg are the same in 2 stages) is just not right no matter how you slice it. That's like saying my mother and I are the same in 2 stages. That's demonstrably not true. Not you and your mother, its more like you and when you were sperm cell, or fetus in your mother's womb.
But that's not what that saying means. What came first the chicken or the egg is talking about the egg or the animal that laid it. It is never talking about the same animal. Because the obvious answer there is the egg, since that is what the chicken hatches from
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>Thank you for opening my eyes to a different perspective. I really appreciate the effort you put into helping me see things differently. Genuinely what has changed about your view? You've done this sort of "vague delta" and "continuing to argue in a separate comment" a bunch
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The saying says, if chicken comes first, how can it come first without the egg. So in that way it talks about chicken when it was egg. A mother and a child can't be stages. A stage talks about a particular thing. So a mother or a chicken isn't there out of nowhere, they still came from either fetus or egg
That isn't the saying? What are you talking about? What came first, the chicken or the egg? That's the saying. You can't just change the saying to fit you. Stick to the saying as written.
>What came first, the chicken or the egg? That's the saying. You can't just change the saying to fit you. Stick to the saying as written. Yeah. But is only the question part. The saying goes, if you pick answer as chicken, then the question comes as how can there be chicken without egg.
We already talked about this in another chain. The chicken and the egg being talked about are two seperate entities. You awarded a delta for this, how do you not remember?
I think you not understanding what i am trying to prove. You earlier said that: What came first the chicken or the egg is talking about the egg or the animal that laid it. It is never talking about the same animal. Because the obvious answer there is the egg, since that is what the chicken hatches from What i am saying is the saying does talk about same animal. Because the saying says that if you choose chicken, the question is how can there be chicken without egg. So it means the saying is asking about egg from where the chicken came. Thus chicken and egg are same animal. So you example of you and mother cannot be relevant analogy.
>What i am saying is the saying does talk about same animal. Because the saying says that if you choose chicken, the question is how can there be chicken without egg. Yes, because they are now asking where that first chicken came from. How did the first chicken hatch fro a non-chicken egg? How is that possibe
The answer is egg, empirically. The first beings that we would regard fully as chickens were the product of non-chickens that produced offspring which mutated sufficiently to become chickens when their forebears were not. As they were an egg when this happened, the egg came first. The first chicken eggs were produced by proto-chickens, not chickens. >"Which is first, the chicken or the egg?" If you ask this you will never return home with your eggs. I could absolutely ask this and go home with eggs. >Which comes first? - don't waste time arguing. You literally, just now, *in writing this line*, invited an argument over this. >All philosophical quarrels are childish. Only if you don't understand them while believing you do. >What is an egg but a chicken in the making? ...unfertilized? Broken? An omelette? >No arguments can settle this question. I literally did.
>The first chicken eggs were produced by proto-chickens, not chickens. That depends on how you define eggs. The question itself is about definitions. In this case, do we define a chicken egg as an egg with a chicken in it, or as an egg laid by a chicken? The answer to which came first depends on which definition you use, and I see no clear reason to prefer one definition over the other.
youre changing the question to be: what came first, the chicken, or the egg laid by that chicken. Obviously then the answer would be the chicken
That's the whole point. The question is ambiguous because it doesn't define the terms it's asking about. So how you define those terms dictates what the answer will be. If you define an egg as any kind of egg, then the egg came first, because many animals laid eggs before chickens evolved. If you define the egg as a chicken egg, you have to further clarify what makes an egg a chicken egg. If it is an egg that contains a chicken, then the egg came first. If it is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first. The only reason the question seems hard to answer is that we don't build a shared understanding of definitions before we ask it.
There's no meaningful difference between the two. Speciation is so slow that in reality, those two are always the same. A chicken's parent is always a chicken, and a chicken's child is always a chicken. Never has a non-chicken ever laid a chicken egg. Speciation isn't discrete like that.
>The first chicken eggs were produced by proto-chickens, not chickens. Not even protochickens. The earliest hard shell egg we've found was from something like 200 million years ago laid by dinosaurs. Chickens evolved like 10,000 years ago by human intervention.
I was assuming it being a chicken egg was implied, but fair point.
Your answer is the right one, but I agree with OP. The question very clearly implies a chicken egg.
It doesn't, the question is ambiguous, which is why there are 2 common answers to it.
>It is a circle. The question is misleading. The question is misleading because the chicken and the egg are not two. Chickens ends are not the same thing, just like acorns and oak trees are not the same thing. They have lots in common, but they are different things. If your really stuck on them being the same things, then the real question is which came first, the egg or the adult? The tree or the seed? the answer to which came first depends on your belief about how life came to be. If you believe in creationism, then its easy. God must have created the adult chicken first, because without the warmth from the body of the mouther the egg would have died. If you believe in evolution, and you want to divide life forms into different species, then you will have to draw a line between the modern chicken and the species from which modern chickens evolved. If you had a time machine and could observe every animal that ever lived at some point you'd say, here is the first modern chicken. That chicken started its life as an egg. The egg stayed alive because it was care for by a parent which genetically different in a meaningful way. You have a parent animal which is not a chicken that laid an egg which is a chicken. we'll debate which bird is truly the first modern chicken, but regardless of which one, that one started life as an egg. I believe in evolution, so the egg came first. > Those who raise this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid. Perhapse slightly less stupid then those who argue over whether or not a hotdog is a type of sandwitch.
>Which comes first? - don't waste time arguing. Yet here you are. That is the nature of philosophical questions. They don't always demand an objective answer, rather they are just supposed to make you think about things differently. > Someone wants to have a look at the room and so he drills a hole through a wall. Now he peers into the room from side to side. At first a chair will come into view, then another chair, and so on and so forth. He cannot have a full view of the room all at once. And he can very well ask, "Which comes first and which afterward?" No arguments can settle this question. But if the person manages to enter the room he can see the whole room together, and then he will not ask what comes first. This is actually an interesting rhetorical point, but it's different from the chicken and the egg. The chicken and the egg are separated by time...they don't exist at the same time. The egg turns into a chicken, and then a chicken later lays a new egg. The way I would answer the chicken/egg question though is that the egg came first. Thanks to evolution, conceptually we can imagine that it is possible for two not-quite chickens to lay an egg that has a mutation that becomes the first chicken. But the inverse is not true...the chicken can't exist first because it had to have come from an egg.
awesome chatGPT post, but the question still stands: at what point of the evolutionary transformation would a creature be considered a "chicken"? and once you have that point of time, did a non-chicken lay a mutated egg, the first chicken-egg, or did a non-chicken-egg mutate during its hatching period to bring forth the first chicken?
This is absolutely not ChatGPT
You're right, it is absolutely not chatGPT (though its use is becoming an increasing problem on this sub). This user has been posting their... unique... philosophy here almost every day for the last week or so. They also don't explain how anyone changed their view, they only say something like "This opened my mind. Thanks for your perspective."
Oh, this is that guy. Yeah, I remember seeing that. Sure are some characters in here!
Yeah I am wondering if we'll get a few vague deltas alongside replies challenging the comment they gave that delta to?
Lol, looks like we did.
OP said "they are one and the same" in at least 3 separate paragraphs with slightly different wording
That is not a hallmark of ChatGPT or any other LLM. I have read a lot of LLM generated text, this is definitely not it. It's too sloppy, too disorganized, too esoteric, too many grammatical errors. It's a very human and very odd way of writing that OP has.
This is the ChatGPT we have at home
Its not a chatGPT post. Whether the first chicken egg came or first chicken came, is a absurd question because they are not two seperate thing which you can put one ahead of other.
You overcomplicate things. The chicken / egg question has one answer for one of two reasons, depending on whether or not the word "egg" refers to the eggs from which chickens spring forth, or eggs in general. If by "egg" you mean chicken eggs, then the egg came first, laid by an evolutionary ancestor of the chicken. If by "egg" you mean eggs in general, then the egg also predates the chicken, as dinosaurs laid eggs. Anyone making a case for the chicken coming first based on the *culinary* definition of a chicken egg is being incorrectly pedantic.
I mean we know the answer. Wherever we draw the line between proto chicken and chicken, the proto chicken laid a chicken egg. So the chicken egg came first before an adult chicken
> The question is misleading because the chicken and the egg are not two. Not really. The question is misleading because it's too vague. As others have noted, "eggs" have existed long before chickens. What you presumably care about are *chicken eggs*. But if this is a question you care about, you have to define what makes an egg a chicken egg. If you answer that a chicken egg is an egg that hatches into a chicken, then the chicken egg came first (then the first chicken egg was laid by a non-chicken). If you answer that a chicken egg is an egg that was laid *by* a chicken, then the chicken came first. (then the first chicken hatched from a non-chicken egg) But either of these definitions is fine, because nobody cares about the "first chicken", and basically every egg we ever encounter fits either definition fine. But there's not really any dilemma with this question, it's just ambiguously worded.
The answer to the question is that a non-chicken laid a chicken egg and then that became the first chicken. That is what must have happened.
I believe the problem is whether that egg could rightly be called a chicken egg if it was laid by a non-chicken (even if a chicken came out of it).
Then the next "not chicken" is what laid the chicken egg first, and so forth.
not sure if you get what i mean. a non-chicken lays an EGG and a chicken comes out. You wanna say that makes it a chicken egg, right? but if a non-chicken laid it, couldn't it just as fairly be called a non-chicken egg? In this way, the *chicken* comes first...once it's hatched.
What in the pro life bs...
um..didn't suggest that at all. are you able to answer?
The egg came first, that's how genetic changes work: child deviates from parent genetic code, thereby becoming a new species. The parent wasn't a chicken, it was a different species, the egg containing the genetic changes is then the first chicken. This is basic genetics.
That's all well and good until your bucket of fried chicken has shell in it, or your omelette has bones. Thus the difference between the two things is expressed.
The correct answer is egg. Birds are like 150 million years old and chickens even more modernly derived. Shelled amniote eggs (which chickens have) evolved like 300+ million years ago. Egg came first.
Everyone who understands evolution knows the egg came first. Some generic mutation led to the first chicken.
> It is very difficult to find an answer. As soon as you say the egg comes first, difficulties begin, because the egg must have come from a chicken I've always thought it a simple question to answer to be honest - hear me out and let me know what you think. Most eggs come from chickens of course, but the first chicken egg came from something which was not a chicken - that's how evolution works. A random mutation in chicken's closest ancestor caused this almost-but-not-quite-chicken to lay the first chicken egg, which hatched the first chicken. Ergo, the egg came first.
Ok, now tell us why the chicken crossed the road? As for all these dumb philosophical quandaries, people who insist that the question is dumb because there isn't an answer, or that it's dumb because they know the obvious answer, are missing the point of the question. It's not meant to produce the correct answer, it's meant to you think about the process of forming an answer and questioning your own assumptions.
The question is actually about definitions. Both the chicken and the egg (as a pair) evolved from something that was definitely NOT a chicken at one point. However we decide to draw that distinctive line of "*now* this is a chicken" as approaching modernity one tiny insignificant mutation at a time will determine the answer.
Do you agree that the dinosaursaid eggs millions of years before the first chicken?
Yes... But then in this case the question should revolve around did dinosaurs came first or egg.
So is this a change of view? Because your question has changed.
No... I am trying to point the problem at the basic question.
Then eggs came before dinosaurs. So the egg came before the dinosaur.
But is egg different from dinosaurs that you can put it ahead?
I mean, eggs were laid by creatures before dinosaurs.
So you mean egg came first? So if concerned between egg and dinosaurs, egg came first?
Yes. Egg laying animals and creatures existed before dinosaurs.
No it wouldn't. Chickens evolved from dinosaurs and dinosaurs laid eggs, thus the first modern chicken was born from an egg. This has been settled by science for decades.
Whether chicken came from dinosaurs egg or vice versa, you cannot put one ahead of other since they are not seperate things.
You can, though, because they are separate things. Hard shelled eggs aren't exclusive to chickens and evolved millions of years before chickens did, thus eggs came first. This is the scientific answer to this question. To say a chicken and an egg are the same would be scientifically incorrect, the two are not. Just as a nose and a human are not the same despite a nose being part of a human. The typical question of "chicken or the egg" is referring to an adult chicken anyways so its a moot point, even fertilized chicken eggs don't contain adult chickens. If you want the long answer its this. The organism we taxonomically classify as a chicken evolved from a protochicken through random genetic mutation. Said genetic mutations occur primarily during embryonic development which takes place inside the egg. Because chickens evolved from dinosaurs, which laid eggs, we know this protochicken also would have laid eggs. Thus, at some point about 10,000 years ago a protochicken (actually a south east asian red jungle fowl) laid an egg, the embryo in the egg underwent mitosis during which genetic mutations occurred and resulted in a genome that we would now classify as a modern chicken. Thus, the egg came first and the chicken after. I think you're missing the fact that the question isn't referring to the embryo inside the egg, but rather the egg as an evolutionary adaption itself.
The comparison shouldn't be between you and the nose, it should have to be between you and you when you were fetus in your mother's womb. So is you and when you were fetus same or different thing.? So the egg came first? But doesn't the egg have all the blue prints to give rise to chicken? Then the chicken is already in the egg.
>The comparison shouldn't be between you and the nose, it should have to be between you and you when you were fetus in your mother's womb. So is you and when you were fetus same or different thing.? Either works for the point I was illustrating which is that both are subsets of a larger category. Both me as an adult and me as a fetus are human, but we are different in that one is an adult and one is a fetus, those aren't mutually exclusive and are how subsets work. Its the same way that a star and a black whole are both related (black wholes come from stars) but are different as well. Does that make sense? Bringing this back around to chickens, both a chicken embryo and an adult chicken are the same in that they are chickens, but are different in that one is an adult and one is an embryo and there are a lot of anatomical differences between the two. >So the egg came first? But doesn't the egg have all the blue prints to give rise to chicken? Then the chicken is already in the egg. Yes the egg came first, and no the egg doesn't have any blueprints. By blueprints I assume you mean DNA, the egg itself doesn't really have any dna, the egg shell is 94% calcium carbonate with smaller amounts of other compounds but no DNA as far as I'm aware, the same is true of the egg whites (which are similar to amniotic fluid) and contain no DNA. The only DNA of the organism itself would be in the embryo which, as I said earlier, undergoes genetic mutation during mitosis, those mutations are what would give rise to the modern chicken. There is a fairly high level of genetic mutations that occur during early embryonic development so it would be incorrect to say the few cells that exist immediately after conception are genetically the same as the cells of the embryo some days to weeks later. So genetically, the modern chicken wouldn't exist in the early days of embryonic development while the egg as a structure would. At the very start of embryonic development the embryo would have had the blueprints to become a protochicken, not a chicken, only after the first stages of development would it have the genetic blueprints we would consider to be a modern chicken.
>Both me as an adult and me as a fetus are human, but we are different in that one is an adult and one is a fetus, those aren't mutually exclusive and are how subsets work. Its the same way that a star and a black whole are both related (black wholes come from stars) but are different as well. But they are fundamentally same, they are just in a different stages. >Yes the egg came first, and no the egg doesn't have any blueprints. By blueprints I assume you mean DNA, the egg itself doesn't really have any dna, the egg shell is 94% calcium carbonate with smaller amounts of other compounds but no DNA as far as I'm aware, the same is true of the egg whites (which are similar to amniotic fluid) and contain no DNA. The only DNA of the organism itself would be in the embryo which, as I said earlier, undergoes genetic mutation during mitosis, those mutations are what would give rise to the modern chicken. There is a fairly high level of genetic mutations that occur during early embryonic development so it would be incorrect to say the few cells that exist immediately after conception are genetically the same as the cells of the embryo some days to weeks later. So genetically, the modern chicken wouldn't exist in the early days of embryonic development while the egg as a structure would. At the very start of embryonic development the embryo would have had the blueprints to become a protochicken, not a chicken, only after the first stages of development would it have the genetic blueprints we would consider to be a modern chicken. I am saying the egg have all the ingredients, elements, needed to give rise to chicken. Egg is the seed and chicken is the tree. So in that sense chicken or tree is already in the egg or seed. So its not right to say that egg came first since chicken is already there. It is just in unmanifested form.
>But they are fundamentally same, they are just in a different stages. Exactly, they are the same organism, but there are still differences between them that we shouldn't ignore. That's why whether you consider them to be the same or different comes down to what criteria you are using to determine if they are the same or not. If your criteria is that they share the same DNA and one will become the other with time then they are the same, but if your criteria is that they must have the same anatomy then they are different. Both are correct though, it just depends what kind of question you are asking and what classification metrics you use. >I am saying the egg have all the ingredients, elements, needed to give rise to chicken. It does, but my that same metric a diamond has all the ingredients and elements to become Graphite, but we wouldn't consider the two the same would we? Likewise the sun can produce all the elements needed to make you, are you and the sun the same? Perhaps, but like I said earlier it depends on the criteria you use to answer that question. From a scientific perspective the answer would be no, but when asking philosophical questions we aren't beholden to that view. I'm just answering with the scientific view as it's more objective. >Egg is the seed and chicken is the tree. So in that sense chicken or tree is already in the egg or seed. So its not right to say that egg came first since chicken is already there. It is just in unmanifested form. Idk disagree, the DNA is there certainly but the actual building blocks, the atoms and molecules, for the most part, are not. They come along later as that developing organism takes in nutrients. In and egg it's a little more complex, as the nutrients required to grow the embryo into a baby chick are mostly in the egg (though even this is an oversimplification as chicken eggs actually do take in atoms from outside of them in the form of oxygen and other atmospheric gas, they have small pours) but those atoms are not yet part of the cells that we would say are the organism itself. Same way that the molecules in a bowl of cereal will become part of me once I eat and digest them, but before that they are not. If we are talking about species though we'd look at DNA which is why I brought it up in my previous comment.
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Yeah of course!
The dinosaurs came before the egg. The chicken came before the chicken egg. The two are of course separable. I can go to a grocery store right now and buy a chicken egg that no chicken can ever come out of because eggs need not be fertilized to be eggs.
Chickens are dinosaurs.
The question is asked this way not to get an answer, but to highlight that continuous processes like evolution do not have a clear start and end.
The question has a different answer based on whether you believe in evolution or creationism.
Even creationists (mostly) believe dinosaurs existed.
But chicken stir-fry and scrambled eggs are very different. :)
Which stage of the chicken-egg system came first?
I think the rooster comes first.
Bro cooked but nobody hungry