Chicken and Egg problem solved

hellioncrow

Chicken and egg debate unscrambled

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

Its the EGG!!!


http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/26/chicken.egg/

what's your opinions fellow PEXers?

Ischaramoochie

I would say that the argument would have been true if and only if by "chicken" we mean "an organism with a genetic sequence which we consider to be shared by other organisms we call chickens."

however, this is not always the case. if indeed a chicken were to be defined solely by genetic material, then each chicken cell could and should be considered an individual chicken (thus increasing the global chicken population for the finger lickin' good people of the world). further, we could divide a chicken in half, but leave its genetic makeup alone. the fact that we end up with two halves of a chicken, not two chickens would mean that there is more to a chicken than its DNA. obviously, frozen chicken DNA in a lab would hardly be called a chicken by any commonsense standards.

further, a chicken is composed of may parts, which are mostly absent in an egg especially in the early stages of its existence. adding to that, the parts of the egg (such as yolk and 'white') are not present in the adult chicken, so we could safely say that the chicken and the egg are two entirely different things due to a difference in constitution.

we cannot say that the same "chicken material" is used throughout the development of the egg to its resulting chicken because the "egg cells" continually die and get replaced either by new egg cells or new "chicken cells" thus making the resulting chicken materially different from the egg. paradoxically, we can point to the "same" chicken even after all of its cells have been replaced by new ones and perhaps this is the reason why we associate the resulting chicken with its egg.

with this, we can infer:

(a) a chicken cannot simply be reduced to its genetic makeup
(b) eggs and their resulting chickens are simply connected by genetic makeup
(c) because of a and b, we cannot necessarily associate chickens with their eggs
(d) because of c, we cannot necessarily infer any temporal relation between the two.

layer

^Regarding the question of whether the chicken and its precedent egg have the same genetic material.. of course! Genes can be turned on or off, activated and repressed throughout an individual's lifetime, the entire genetic makeup however, remains essentially the same. (This explains fetal development, etc.). That is disregarding somatic mutations acquired during the egg/chicken's lifetime.

The argument, however, is still faulty. What could have gave birth to the first chicken egg? A fish? lizard? That we cannot say. Somatic mutations from a pre-chicken organism does not translate to the birth of a chicken-egg, it has to be germ-cell mutations.

The answer? Still Darwin. It's not a pure black and white thing. Evolution/natural selection slowly transformed a certain pre-chicken organism into the chicken we know today. So there's really no first chicken egg.

st.anger

finally, i can rest easy at night.

sabaybunot

i say egg.. it fries a lot quicker thus served sooner...

i like mine with a little dash of paprika, pepper, and grated cheese


uh oh... wrong forum..