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Wait, people actually debate this? As per theory of evolution, current species were created from ancestor species. Since chicken's ancestor species obviously l
by rk06 2y ago
Wait, people actually debate this?
As per theory of evolution, current species were created from ancestor species. Since chicken's ancestor species obviously laid eggs. It stands to reason that first chicken came from chicken egg which came from non-chicken!
So, egg came first.
Update: fixed typo
- andrewflnr 2y agoHere it's a joke, I think. Mostly.
- from-nibly 2y agoActually it's more like trading pokemon. You could probably breed each ancient chicken in a chain all the way up to modern chickens but you just can't breed modern chickens with ancient chickens directly.
- jimmaswell 2y agoWhat about when the number of chromosomes changes?
- pelagicAustral 2y agoI think a bigger debate is why did it cross the road...
- is_true 2y agoIt doesn't. The chicken doesn't know it's a road
- batch12 2y agoA road is not a road if a chicken doesn't know what a road is? That's an interesting rabbit hole to go down.
- swores 2y agoI assume they're trying to make a joke, as it's too obviously illogical if not. (Admittedly it also seems fairly obviously not funny to me, but that's more subjective than believing that an animal can't "do" anything that it doesn't have a conscious understanding of.)
- pelagicAustral 2y agoOr, if a chicken crosses a road and nobody is looking, did the chicken crossed the road?
- batch12 2y agoYes, I'd say so since the road doesn't have to be perceived by a human to be a road. Does it make a sound?
- randomdata 2y agoIf a road has not been perceived by a human, what created it?
- batch12 2y agoI meant at the time of the alleged chicken crossing
- maxwell 2y agoIn practice, the chickens I see along the sides of roads clearly know what roads are. And don't cross them.
- randomdata 2y agoWhen we had cattle the cow paths showed up in the pasture, even where there was no obvious destination (for the shortest route to explain it). Legend has it that cattle form these paths along magnetic lines. Anyway, the veracity of that legend doesn't matter, but it is here merely to illustrate the idea that perhaps we subconsciously build our roads on lines that chickens won't cross, rather than them being aware of the road?
- is_true 2y agoI spent an afternoon in a chicken farm while the owners were installing a synthetic grass football field and the chicken that were free just avoided that grass. We didn't know why, besides the fact that it didn't have any bugs in it it looked very similar to the rest of the grass
- RobotToaster 2y agoA related question would be "what is a chicken", or where is the line between "non-chicken" and "chicken".
- maxwell 2y agoThere's a gradient of chickenness.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- maxwell 2y agoYep, Aristotle was wrong. "Chicken and egg problems" aren't paradoxes, the challenge is to find which is the egg.
- bbor 2y agoLol whenever you can so casually say that a great scientist is wrong, that might be a good heuristic to know you misunderstood the question. It's a philosophical paradox stemming from our conception of species, not an empirical question about fossil records :)
- brna-2 2y agoAlmost started discussing this with you. :D
- andrewflnr 2y agoTrue in the abstract, but calling Aristotle a "great scientist" is a stretch at best. He wasn't much of an empiricist.
- bbor 2y agoVery true and well put, but IMHO that's not a productive definition of "scientist". You're definitely on the side of common usage, but this is one of the many hills I'd die on; all scientists necessarily employ intuitive intellectual tools at some point in their process, so it feels silly to cut out those who primarily use them if they're still productively employing systematic thought. The upside of this is that Mathematicians get to be scientists, too! The downside is that you also have to let the darn philosophers in ;)
- andrewflnr 2y agoYou're basically saying that scientist and "using systematic thought" should be synonymous. Why have two terms for the same thing? Whereas we definitely need a separate term for people who focus on empirical work, since that implies distinct properties of the kind of work. Mathematical and philosophical work simply aren't the same as scientific work, despite the non-zero overlap. It's almost like there's a reason the common usage is the way it is.
- bbor 2y agoThe title is XKCD-style Nerd Sniping ;) The body of the article is about how a unicellular species formed multicellular-/animal-like groups via 'polar' division. I don't really understand what the difference between a colony of unicellular organisms and a multicellular organism is, but given the last sentence of the article, I don't think they do either: This discovery could also shed new light on a long-standing scientific debate concerning 600 million-year-old fossils that resemble embryos, and could challenge certain traditional conceptions of multicellularity.
- marcosdumay 2y ago> I don't think they do either They do know. But it's not a binary phenomenon, and people don't all agree where to place the line.
- SteveSmith16384 2y agoI'm going to call a non-chicken a chocken from now on. :)
- noman-land 2y agoThe problem, though, is since the shell of the egg was made by a non-chicken, the chicken's egg is not a chicken egg. So the chicken is first, and that chicken's egg is the first chicken egg.
- felipemnoa 2y agoNah, assuming that the question is really asking whether a chicken’s egg came first or a chicken, then it stands to reason that a chicken came first, from a dinosaur’s egg, and then a chicken’s egg.
- makz 2y agoI have a problem with that. How could non-chicken laid a chicken egg.
- latexr 2y agoChickens didn’t just pop into existence. Another species laid mutated eggs, whose offspring eventually laid more mutated eggs, and on and on until from one of those arose what we recognise as a chicken. Though the change will have been so gradual, it’s not like we have an exact moment to pinpoint.