4 ms·

Then the question just becomes which definition is correct.

Supermancho 5y ago
But it's not about the definition, because the definition mentioned is not correct anymore than saying the definition is if the egg was laid on a Sunday. > If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken Species are assumed to produce eggs of the same species. Like many convenient turns of phrase, this isn't strictly true. What the egg contains (unless the egg casing is a relevant attribute) is how it is characterized. A mutation exists in the developing embryo, so a non-chicken had a chicken-containing egg. This is a chicken egg, which necessarily came first. Looking at any given xenopregnancy (a hybrid Liger, or panda fetus in a cat, et al). The carrying species does not make the result of that species. eg If there was a non-chicken species (say, a turkey) which produced eggs that were genetically and practically identical to chicken-containing eggs, they would be called chicken eggs.
- crdrost 5y ago
  I mean that's a bit over-simplistic... It's not that a nonchicken lays a chicken egg, that implies an either/orness of chickenhood that would be radically unique. What actually happened was that at around 10,000 years ago a group of birds similar to modern red junglefowl either migrated or was forcibly taken from northern Thailand to the Indian subcontinent, where they started mating with the local birds similar to grey junglefowl with whom they were still able to interbreed. If you call those each 99%-chickens each then you had a steady meeting of two 99%-chicken lines interbreeding until they formed something steadily closer to our 100%-chicken lines, but presumably also creating 98%-chickens etc. in their breeding population. The variation inside the breeding population is larger than the distance of the progenitor populations to the final result. Viewed this way, what actually caused chickens to happen was the migration, not the genetics. It was the part where the two red junglefowl groups came out of genetic contact and started to diverge. On the assumption that these red junglefowl were adults (which is obvious if it was a migration, but merely likely if it was forced by humans), this means that a population of non-chickens was divided into two subpopulations, one of which was chickens, one of which wasn't. So even agreeing that we should categorize the egg by the creature it produced immediately after hatching, you still get by this argument that a nonchicken egg hatched into a nonchicken which by circumstance became a chicken... Chickens came first, and then their chicken eggs.
  - not2b 5y ago
    Suppose you have a definition of a chicken that is rigorous enough to break any ties. Then the first chicken that meets this definition was hatched from an egg. That egg was laid by a non-chicken (some animal that was very close to, but not exactly, a chicken). So the egg came first.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - SamBam 5y ago
      > So the egg came first. Which egg? Obviously "the egg that the chicken hatched from" came first, no one's debating that. But that's all you've said. If the question is "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then it depends on whether the chicken egg is one that houses the chicken, or the one that is laid by a chicken.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        A hybrid of a canary and a goldfinch is a mule. Would you really argue that those eggs hatching into mules are not mule eggs? I could see an argument that those eggs, coming out of canaries, could count as canary eggs, but not in a way that stops them from being mule eggs. "mule eggs" definitely needs to include the eggs that hatch into mules.
    - jtsiskin 5y ago
      Even with this perfect definition there are still ambiguities. You could still debate if a non-chicken egg with chicken DNA is a chicken egg. Its shell and yolk, all contents, were produced by a non-chicken - imagine the eggshell was blue, not white, and the final allele change to become “chicken” switched the “egg color laid once grown” to white. If all this eggs contents were produced by a genetically non-chicken - the egg is blue - is it really a “chicken egg”? Imagine you took a chicken egg, and modified the DNA so that an elephant would hatch. Is this a “chicken egg (with elephant DNA)” or an “elephant egg (with shell, white, and yolk produced by a chicken)”?
    - 5y ago

But it's not about the definition, because the definition mentioned is not correct anymore than saying the definition is if the egg was laid on a Sunday. > If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken Species are assumed to produce eggs of the same species. Like many convenient turns of phrase, this isn't strictly true. What the egg contains (unless the egg casing is a relevant attribute) is how it is characterized. A mutation exists in the developing embryo, so a non-chicken had a chicken-containing egg. This is a chicken egg, which necessarily came first. Looking at any given xenopregnancy (a hybrid Liger, or panda fetus in a cat, et al). The carrying species does not make the result of that species. eg If there was a non-chicken species (say, a turkey) which produced eggs that were genetically and practically identical to chicken-containing eggs, they would be called chicken eggs.

crdrost 5y ago
I mean that's a bit over-simplistic... It's not that a nonchicken lays a chicken egg, that implies an either/orness of chickenhood that would be radically unique. What actually happened was that at around 10,000 years ago a group of birds similar to modern red junglefowl either migrated or was forcibly taken from northern Thailand to the Indian subcontinent, where they started mating with the local birds similar to grey junglefowl with whom they were still able to interbreed. If you call those each 99%-chickens each then you had a steady meeting of two 99%-chicken lines interbreeding until they formed something steadily closer to our 100%-chicken lines, but presumably also creating 98%-chickens etc. in their breeding population. The variation inside the breeding population is larger than the distance of the progenitor populations to the final result. Viewed this way, what actually caused chickens to happen was the migration, not the genetics. It was the part where the two red junglefowl groups came out of genetic contact and started to diverge. On the assumption that these red junglefowl were adults (which is obvious if it was a migration, but merely likely if it was forced by humans), this means that a population of non-chickens was divided into two subpopulations, one of which was chickens, one of which wasn't. So even agreeing that we should categorize the egg by the creature it produced immediately after hatching, you still get by this argument that a nonchicken egg hatched into a nonchicken which by circumstance became a chicken... Chickens came first, and then their chicken eggs.
- not2b 5y ago
  Suppose you have a definition of a chicken that is rigorous enough to break any ties. Then the first chicken that meets this definition was hatched from an egg. That egg was laid by a non-chicken (some animal that was very close to, but not exactly, a chicken). So the egg came first.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - SamBam 5y ago
    > So the egg came first. Which egg? Obviously "the egg that the chicken hatched from" came first, no one's debating that. But that's all you've said. If the question is "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then it depends on whether the chicken egg is one that houses the chicken, or the one that is laid by a chicken.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      A hybrid of a canary and a goldfinch is a mule. Would you really argue that those eggs hatching into mules are not mule eggs? I could see an argument that those eggs, coming out of canaries, could count as canary eggs, but not in a way that stops them from being mule eggs. "mule eggs" definitely needs to include the eggs that hatch into mules.
  - jtsiskin 5y ago
    Even with this perfect definition there are still ambiguities. You could still debate if a non-chicken egg with chicken DNA is a chicken egg. Its shell and yolk, all contents, were produced by a non-chicken - imagine the eggshell was blue, not white, and the final allele change to become “chicken” switched the “egg color laid once grown” to white. If all this eggs contents were produced by a genetically non-chicken - the egg is blue - is it really a “chicken egg”? Imagine you took a chicken egg, and modified the DNA so that an elephant would hatch. Is this a “chicken egg (with elephant DNA)” or an “elephant egg (with shell, white, and yolk produced by a chicken)”?
  - 5y ago