It’s an egg that will hatch into a chicken, since the “first” chicken must have hatched out of an egg that was laid and fertilized by two “non-chickens” whose DNA combined together to make a full-blown chicken. Of course it wasn’t actually just one egg, but really, no matter how you think about it, the egg came first.
Did a giraffe stretch its neck longer and longer, and then pass that long-necked gene onto its kids? No.
Can an embryo that gets a random mutation while developing in the egg/womb pass it on to their children? Yes.
This gets a bit more complicated if you really dig into it, though. Environment does change the expression of genes, and that particular sequence of genes that have been activated/shut-off/whatever can be passed on to children too.
Hence why children who were born to two shorter parents will often grow much taller than them if given much better nutrition. Or why obesity often shows up chronically in families that were poor or had limited access to healthier foods in other ways; their bodies had adapted to grab and store every extra calorie they could to guard against starvation, and unfortunately shutting that gene expression off naturally takes multiple generations.
I agree, and I’ve made the same argument. It’s perfectly valid, Unless the egg belongs to the creature who laid it, instead of the creature that hatched from it.
If the egg in question is a “proto-chicken’s egg” because it was laid by a proto-chicken, then the chicken would have come before the chicken egg.
No it wouldn’t. If we’re going to talk about the creation of chickens as happening at a single instance of egg-laying, the two progenitors of said first chicken would be proto-chickens whose DNA combined in the fertilized egg to make, for the first time ever, a chicken. Yes, it’s a chicken egg, because it contains a chicken, but it’s also a proto-chicken’s egg because it wasn’t laid by a full chicken. It couldn’t have been, they didn’t exist yet.
There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.
By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.
Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn’t be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.
The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.
No, if a chicken could hatch out of it, regardless of whether or not it actually did, it’s a chicken egg. Nothing else could hatch out of it and it didn’t somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn’t hatch.
it didn’t somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn’t hatch.
Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.
Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a “Shicken”, if I hadn’t eaten it first. But, because there was never a “Shicken”, there could never be a “Shicken” egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.
No, the shicken egg was a shicken egg even prior to you eating it. The act of giving it a name is irrelevant. The proto-chicken could’ve lain a hundred eggs, each becoming a new “chicken”. If 99 of them die off and are never born then that does not mean they didn’t exist. It just means they did not exist in a way where we could’ve given them a name.
The distinction between “chicken” and “egg” is biologically irrelevant: they both refer to the same organism. The terms are descriptive, not prescriptive. The organism will progress the same way, regardless of what we decide to say about it.
The chicken/egg argument is purely one of semantics. “Giving it a name” isn’t just relevant to the discussion, it is the only factor relevant to the discussion.
The way you would have us describe the egg prevents us from accurately and consistently defining an egg. An egg laid by a chicken could mature into a new species, and by your arguments, should be described as an egg of that new species.
This creates a linguistic uncertainty in any case where the egg’s potential is not and cannot be known. Is there a Shicken egg among the dozen you bought? A Blargleblat egg? Do you have the eggs of a dozen new evolutions with a common chicken ancestor? You cannot say with certainty.
However, if we describe the egg as the product of the creature that laid it, we have no such uncertainty. If we describe it as the possession of the offspring within it, we have no such uncertainty. The uncertainty only arises when we try to define it by an unknowable condition that may or may not occur.
Feel like any kind of mutation that turns the pre chicken into the proto chicken happens at birth, if the pre chicken had a mutated offspring, I’d wager the egg is mutated significantly from what a normal pre chicken egg would be, since after all it has to support a proto chicken, not a pre chicken.
I feel like my comment in another thread is even more relevant here:
I have no direct knowledge about that, but if we take the analogy of the egg (shell, albumen and yolk sack) being the life-support system of the embryo during gestation, in humans the placenta would be a big part of that, and exactly whose body it is part of its not simple (from what I remember both mother and child contribute cells, and the ‘plan’ for building it comes from the father’s genes).
So maybe for chickens it could be ambiguous whether the shell ‘belongs’ to the laying generation or the hatching one. Seems like mostly a human taxonomy distinction to make anyway, obviously it’s in between the two, but we like to draw the line somewhere.
That’s about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken’s egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn’t become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.
We’re not talking about eggs laid by chickens, we’re talking about eggs laid by the things that weren’t quite chickens, but the eggs of which contain chickens, due to a novel DNA combination.
The question posed is what is a chicken egg? Is it an egg from which a chicken hatches or an egg which a chicken lays? I’d argue it’s the latter. Because we already consider eggs from which no chicken could hatch but that a chicken laid, chicken eggs.
Incorrect, a “chicken’s egg” would be an egg in the possession of a chicken, which would be the egg a chicken lays. The “first chicken” did not hatch out of an egg laid by a chicken because they didn’t exist.
You’re right. I just realized that I typed the opposite of what I meant. And then in another comment said what you did thinking I was defending my og opinion. I’m all over the place this morning.
Amy is a chicken. Amy lays an egg. Brenda is a chicken. Brenda hatched from the egg Amy laid. The egg in question is clearly a chicken’s egg, but is it Amy’s egg, or Brenda’s egg?
So, it doesn’t become a Chicken’s egg until Brenda has come into existence. Brenda being the chicken. The chicken has to exist for the egg to become a Chicken’s egg.
The first chicken egg is the egg that Brenda hatched from, but it didn’t become a chicken egg until Brenda was a chicken and not just a (proto-chicken) egg.
Right and wrong. It was a chicken’s egg when Amy laid it, but it was a chicken egg when Brenda was hatched. So yes, the chicken has to exist for the first chicken’s egg, but the first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, that was not a chicken’s egg.
To clarify, I’m assuming that in this case Amy was the first evolution of the chicken, therefore she laid the first chicken’s egg that was the second chicken egg, bevause her parents weren’t chickens, so what was laid wasn’t a chicken’s egg until Amy hatched. Schrodinger’s egg if you will.
Amy is a proto-chicken. Her offspring, Brenda, is the first creature containing the mutation that distinguishes chickens from proto-chickens. Brenda is the first chicken.
Amy’s egg couldn’t be a chicken egg because there was no such thing as a chicken when she laid it. There would be no such thing as a chicken until Brenda existed, at which time the egg that would become Brenda also became a chicken egg.
The chicken egg could not have come first. The first chicken egg was laid by something that was not quite a chicken, but it didn’t become a chicken egg until it had developed into a chicken.
You established right away in your first post that Amy is a chicken. That means she came from a chicken egg, but it wasn’t a chicken’s egg until Amy was a chicken. Until the hatch it was her parent’s egg, whatever species they may have been.
I think we’re saying the same thing, but in my version, Amy was the first chicken hatched from non chicken parents, and laid the first chicken’s egg, birthing Brenda.
In the end, chicken came first, which in turn made the egg, a chicken egg, and coincidentally that chicken’s egg.
My bad, I was making a different point with that analogy, and I had moved on some time ago. The app I’m using makes it difficult to read back up the thread.
I think we are making similar arguments. I would say that the egg Amy hatched from is the first “chicken’s egg”, but it is only the first chicken’s egg because it belongs to Amy, and it did not exist until chicken-Amy existed, which was some time well after the egg was laid.
Sorry, I’m getting distracted with real life right now.
Is a “chicken egg” an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that will hatch into a chicken?
It’s an egg that will hatch into a chicken, since the “first” chicken must have hatched out of an egg that was laid and fertilized by two “non-chickens” whose DNA combined together to make a full-blown chicken. Of course it wasn’t actually just one egg, but really, no matter how you think about it, the egg came first.
Can mutations that occurred during life be transmitted to offspring? Biology classes were a long time ago.
That depends on what you mean.
Did a giraffe stretch its neck longer and longer, and then pass that long-necked gene onto its kids? No.
Can an embryo that gets a random mutation while developing in the egg/womb pass it on to their children? Yes.
This gets a bit more complicated if you really dig into it, though. Environment does change the expression of genes, and that particular sequence of genes that have been activated/shut-off/whatever can be passed on to children too.
Hence why children who were born to two shorter parents will often grow much taller than them if given much better nutrition. Or why obesity often shows up chronically in families that were poor or had limited access to healthier foods in other ways; their bodies had adapted to grab and store every extra calorie they could to guard against starvation, and unfortunately shutting that gene expression off naturally takes multiple generations.
This was a fascinating comment to read, thanks for posting 🙂
Yes, that’s the driving force of evolution.
I agree, and I’ve made the same argument. It’s perfectly valid, Unless the egg belongs to the creature who laid it, instead of the creature that hatched from it.
If the egg in question is a “proto-chicken’s egg” because it was laid by a proto-chicken, then the chicken would have come before the chicken egg.
No it wouldn’t. If we’re going to talk about the creation of chickens as happening at a single instance of egg-laying, the two progenitors of said first chicken would be proto-chickens whose DNA combined in the fertilized egg to make, for the first time ever, a chicken. Yes, it’s a chicken egg, because it contains a chicken, but it’s also a proto-chicken’s egg because it wasn’t laid by a full chicken. It couldn’t have been, they didn’t exist yet.
There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.
By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.
Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn’t be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.
The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.
I can’t believe I’m actually reading this thread.
Discourse as old as time, song as old as rhyme, chicken or the egg.
No, if a chicken could hatch out of it, regardless of whether or not it actually did, it’s a chicken egg. Nothing else could hatch out of it and it didn’t somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn’t hatch.
Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.
Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a “Shicken”, if I hadn’t eaten it first. But, because there was never a “Shicken”, there could never be a “Shicken” egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.
No, the shicken egg was a shicken egg even prior to you eating it. The act of giving it a name is irrelevant. The proto-chicken could’ve lain a hundred eggs, each becoming a new “chicken”. If 99 of them die off and are never born then that does not mean they didn’t exist. It just means they did not exist in a way where we could’ve given them a name.
The distinction between “chicken” and “egg” is biologically irrelevant: they both refer to the same organism. The terms are descriptive, not prescriptive. The organism will progress the same way, regardless of what we decide to say about it.
The chicken/egg argument is purely one of semantics. “Giving it a name” isn’t just relevant to the discussion, it is the only factor relevant to the discussion.
The way you would have us describe the egg prevents us from accurately and consistently defining an egg. An egg laid by a chicken could mature into a new species, and by your arguments, should be described as an egg of that new species.
This creates a linguistic uncertainty in any case where the egg’s potential is not and cannot be known. Is there a Shicken egg among the dozen you bought? A Blargleblat egg? Do you have the eggs of a dozen new evolutions with a common chicken ancestor? You cannot say with certainty.
However, if we describe the egg as the product of the creature that laid it, we have no such uncertainty. If we describe it as the possession of the offspring within it, we have no such uncertainty. The uncertainty only arises when we try to define it by an unknowable condition that may or may not occur.
Feel like any kind of mutation that turns the pre chicken into the proto chicken happens at birth, if the pre chicken had a mutated offspring, I’d wager the egg is mutated significantly from what a normal pre chicken egg would be, since after all it has to support a proto chicken, not a pre chicken.
I feel like my comment in another thread is even more relevant here:
I have no direct knowledge about that, but if we take the analogy of the egg (shell, albumen and yolk sack) being the life-support system of the embryo during gestation, in humans the placenta would be a big part of that, and exactly whose body it is part of its not simple (from what I remember both mother and child contribute cells, and the ‘plan’ for building it comes from the father’s genes). So maybe for chickens it could be ambiguous whether the shell ‘belongs’ to the laying generation or the hatching one. Seems like mostly a human taxonomy distinction to make anyway, obviously it’s in between the two, but we like to draw the line somewhere.
I think it’s an egg laid by a chicken. Unfertilized eggs laid by chickens that will never become chickens are still chicken eggs.
That’s about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken’s egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn’t become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.
We’re not talking about eggs laid by chickens, we’re talking about eggs laid by the things that weren’t quite chickens, but the eggs of which contain chickens, due to a novel DNA combination.
The question posed is what is a chicken egg? Is it an egg from which a chicken hatches or an egg which a chicken lays? I’d argue it’s the latter. Because we already consider eggs from which no chicken could hatch but that a chicken laid, chicken eggs.
The former, otherwise it would be “chicken’s egg”.
Incorrect, a “chicken’s egg” would be an egg in the possession of a chicken, which would be the egg a chicken lays. The “first chicken” did not hatch out of an egg laid by a chicken because they didn’t exist.
You’re right. I just realized that I typed the opposite of what I meant. And then in another comment said what you did thinking I was defending my og opinion. I’m all over the place this morning.
Amy is a chicken. Amy lays an egg. Brenda is a chicken. Brenda hatched from the egg Amy laid. The egg in question is clearly a chicken’s egg, but is it Amy’s egg, or Brenda’s egg?
It was Amy’s egg that Brenda inherited, so now it’s Brenda’s egg. So the OG egg was Amy’s.
So, it doesn’t become a Chicken’s egg until Brenda has come into existence. Brenda being the chicken. The chicken has to exist for the egg to become a Chicken’s egg.
The first chicken egg is the egg that Brenda hatched from, but it didn’t become a chicken egg until Brenda was a chicken and not just a (proto-chicken) egg.
Right and wrong. It was a chicken’s egg when Amy laid it, but it was a chicken egg when Brenda was hatched. So yes, the chicken has to exist for the first chicken’s egg, but the first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, that was not a chicken’s egg.
To clarify, I’m assuming that in this case Amy was the first evolution of the chicken, therefore she laid the first chicken’s egg that was the second chicken egg, bevause her parents weren’t chickens, so what was laid wasn’t a chicken’s egg until Amy hatched. Schrodinger’s egg if you will.
Amy is a proto-chicken. Her offspring, Brenda, is the first creature containing the mutation that distinguishes chickens from proto-chickens. Brenda is the first chicken.
Amy’s egg couldn’t be a chicken egg because there was no such thing as a chicken when she laid it. There would be no such thing as a chicken until Brenda existed, at which time the egg that would become Brenda also became a chicken egg.
The chicken egg could not have come first. The first chicken egg was laid by something that was not quite a chicken, but it didn’t become a chicken egg until it had developed into a chicken.
You established right away in your first post that Amy is a chicken. That means she came from a chicken egg, but it wasn’t a chicken’s egg until Amy was a chicken. Until the hatch it was her parent’s egg, whatever species they may have been.
I think we’re saying the same thing, but in my version, Amy was the first chicken hatched from non chicken parents, and laid the first chicken’s egg, birthing Brenda.
In the end, chicken came first, which in turn made the egg, a chicken egg, and coincidentally that chicken’s egg.
My bad, I was making a different point with that analogy, and I had moved on some time ago. The app I’m using makes it difficult to read back up the thread.
I think we are making similar arguments. I would say that the egg Amy hatched from is the first “chicken’s egg”, but it is only the first chicken’s egg because it belongs to Amy, and it did not exist until chicken-Amy existed, which was some time well after the egg was laid.
Sorry, I’m getting distracted with real life right now.