At 11:00 PM -0400 7/5/07, Robert Cummings wrote:
On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 22:44 -0400, tedd wrote:
At 4:48 PM -0400 7/5/07, Daniel Brown wrote:
>On 7/5/07, Robert Cummings <robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 15:04 -0500, Kaleb Pomeroy wrote:
>>> Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
>>
>>The egg, fish were laying them long before chickens walked the earth :)
> >
>
> But actually, it was dinosaurs.
Ummmmm... fish predate all land creatures according to evolution....
that's not to say something with eggs didn't predate fish, but I'm too
lazy to go look.
Yes, but I was talking about predecessors to the chicken, like
Archeopteryx (one of the first feathered dinosaurs), which is/was (my
education is dated) believed to be the predecessor of birds.
As far as eggs are concerned, they predate fish considerably.
So, IF the question is "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" --
then the answer is clearly "the egg".
However, if the question is "Which came first, the chicken or the
chicken's egg?" -- then the answer is much less obvious.
Evolution is alteration in the genetic code usually caused by changes
in the critter's environment. So, the question becomes, is the
alteration of the genetic code found in the egg a random fluctuation
of genetic code not found in the parent, or is it the product of a
lifetime experience, under the influence of the parent's environment,
that changed the parents genetic code in reproduction?
Also, there is a difference in the genetic code you have and the code
your pass on in terms of dominance/preference with your spouse's
genetic code. In other words, male and female produce something
different than either of them. However, for both to reach
reproduction age, they both had to have "successful" genetic makeup.
As such, their offspring has a different chance, perhaps better, of
reaching reproduction age and passing on it's contribution.
Now at what point does the offspring differ enough in genetic code to
be classified as a chicken? That's an interesting question
considering that it's offspring may not be a chicken (consider that).
Pre-chickens will have to go through numerous generations before
producing a "true" chicken in our taxonomy.
I doubt that one can demarcate the non-chicken parents from the
chicken offspring. So... it is perplexing.
Cheers,
tedd
===
But dwelling on the topic, the chicken egg problem is actually stated
incorrectly to some degree, it's a more interesting question to ask:
What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg?
Now this question is only perplexing until you realize that the concept
of "chicken egg" is ambiguous. Is a "chicken egg" an egg that was
created by a chicken, or an egg from which a chicken hatches? As such,
there are two possible answers to the age old question...
Case 1: a "chicken egg" is defined by having been created
by a chicken.
In this case the chicken must have come first :)
Case 2: a "chicken egg" is defined by being an egg from
which a chicken hatches.
In this case the egg comes first since the first
genetic chicken was born from an egg created by
it's direct ancestor that was not a chicken.
See... it's not perplexing at all :)
Cheers,
Rob.
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