Eggs don’t exist, neither do chickens. I mean, not really. They exist in a quantum state, only because you believe they exist, do they, exist. Trust me, I’ve seen almost 40 years of this one to recognize an evolutionary temporal paradox…
2 Likes
Saying the egg did because there were other creatures that laid eggs before there were chickens is kind of the gotcha answer, and is technically correct. But, I think with the actual question/conundrum it is implied that it’s “Which came first, the chicken, or the chicken egg?”
When answering this, you could say because of evolution it’s the egg, because there was the almost-chicken laying the egg, then there was the chicken hatching. But, I say because of evolution, it’s safer to say something else:
Since the evolutionary process is so incredibly slow, there wouldn’t be some non-chicken laying an egg that all of a sudden hatched a chicken. There would be such a gradual change, over such a long period of time, from the obviously not-chicken creature to the obviously chicken, there wouldn’t be a definite point where a non-chicken laid an egg that hatched a chicken.
In other words, they came at the same time.
3 Likes
I’m gonna be the guy who contradicts the inestimable @sethgodin to say that it is semantics: do you define a chicken egg as an egg produced by a chicken or an egg that contains a chicken?
Then I’m gonna go ahead and fall back to pragmatics and say that this is all just variations on the sorites paradox and it doesn’t matter in functional terms. If you are in a situation where you need to define chicken eggs as “eggs that come from chickens”, great. And if you are in a situation where it makes the most sense to define chicken eggs as “eggs that contain chickens”, you can do that too. Just try to ensure consensus in your context.
5 Likes
Evolution doesn’t provide a hard binary distinction between “chicken” and “not yet a chicken.”
Naming something as a distinct species is very much a matter of semantics.
8 Likes
I hope we can agree that the only thing that can come out of a chicken egg is a chicken.
But evolution and evidence make it clear that something that’s not-quite-a-chicken can lay a chicken egg.
There has to be a line between chicken and not-chicken, and the only way to cross that line is for a mutation to happen, and it happens when the not-quite-a-chicken lays a chicken egg.
3 Likes
I don’t know if we can agree that the only thing that can come out of a chicken egg is a chicken. (To be churlish, sometimes a delicious yolk and albumin come out of a chicken egg.)
It sounds like you’re implicitly defining “chicken egg” to mean “an egg that can produce a chicken if fertilized and matured”. Which is a perfectly good definition. But to define chicken egg as “an egg produced by a chicken” is also perfectly good. (And, pragmatically speaking, much easier to validate.) Most of the time these two definitions are equivalent, but to be sure there are some interesting edge cases where they diverge (like the proto-chicken scenario). And in that edge case, the only thing that determines whether you’ve got a chicken egg or a proto-chicken egg is which definition of “chicken egg” you’re using.
Also, I can’t believe I didn’t trot this out earlier, but:
15 Likes
No, a (mutant proto-) chicken came from a proto-chicken’s egg.
2 Likes
Mostly, chickens come out of chicken’s eggs. But a chicken could also lay an egg (a chicken’s egg) containing something that isn’t a chicken.
It isn’t a “line” though, this takes many generations to establish species.
It’s quite a well proven topic, there are a lot of studies showing this, can’t be bothered to find a citation though.
3 Likes
8 Likes
Nature rarely produces such clear-cut lines and even if it did no two biologists would be likely to agree on exactly where it lay.
(Well, it would probably lay in a nest of some kind but you know what I mean)
8 Likes
How about a Cockatrice?
8 Likes
Another possible interpretation (to a question that ultimately has no answer) would be that causality is an illusion, so the question “Which happened first?” has no meaning, because nothing “happened” at all, it all just is at once. See: Tralfamadore
1 Like
That Trump University education is really paying off? 
@wazroth Maybe the Pedant Pendant badge will return. Until then, you can console yourself with a Pedant Pending Badge.
6 Likes
They didn’t even get to the question of why the chicken or the egg crossed the road…
4 Likes
If they told you, they’d have to kill you.
5 Likes
Ah, the most evil version of the Rickroll. Click that link and get killed with a glance!
7 Likes
News: “A man was stabbed to death over this argument!”
BBS: “Let’s immediately have the same argument”
19 Likes
Right? Plus every BBSer already knows the precise and universally accepted way to sharpen knives…
12 Likes
