this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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The chicken/egg problem is really a problem of a too narrow scope.
"What came first the chicken or the egg?"
The answer is obviously the egg as plenty of other species before chickens laid eggs.
The concept of an egg is far older than the concept of the chicken.
It's implicit that the question is about a chicken egg, specifically.
The chicken egg came before the chicken, as the thing that laid the chicken egg was not quite a chicken
Correct!
I had this exact discussion within the last year. The first egg was a chicken egg. Every subsequent egg was a chicken's egg.
Until a chicken lays an egg containing something that is not quite a chicken
See, I think of the egg as being possessed by the mother, so it would still be a chicken's egg to me, but it could simultaneously be a "something else" egg.
It would be a chicken's non-chicken egg
Do you want basilisks? Because this is how you get basilisks.
Schroedinger's egg
Is a chicken egg defined as an egg that will grow into a chicken, or as an egg laid by a chicken?
That is a linguistical question. What does "chicken" in "chicken egg" mean? What is chicken? What is in the egg or who laid it?
Is a chicken egg an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that if fertilized would hatch into a chicken?
That is a great follow up question, is an egg defined by what ever laid it or by it's contents?
Chickens don't lay eggs, hens do. 😉
Chicken's egg vs chicken egg
Who is possessive in your "chicken's egg"? Whose egg is it? The animal who laid the egg or the animal who lays in the egg?
I am fairly certain that chicken egg is chicken's egg after a couple decade of human being lazy. We love to drop stuff in languages.
So chicken's egg vs chicken's egg.
The thing is that species aren't that clear cut but exist on a spectrum. There is no first chicken as little as there is a first blue shade on a color gradient. Sure, you can draw the line somewhere but even when clearly defined as ancestor of all modern chickens, you can't really go down to the individual level.
Exactly. So there's no way to measure the exact egg that was first born to a species we would not recognize as a chicken.
(Edit: Warning: Only bullshit meant to amuse and fascinate follows. I've been watching too much "SmartyPants" on DropOut.tv, where they try to make each-other laugh with serious sounding silly presenations.)
Further, we might each choose a different arbitrary egg and declare that eggs parent "not a chicken".
But for this question, that doesn't have to matter.
If we can all agree that something in the ancestry of the modern chicken was not a chicken, and agree that it was likely still birthed from an egg, then we can conclude that that egg came first.
Even if we cannot agree about which exact egg hatched into the first chicken, or which exact animal was the first chicken, we can agree on their relationship such that we can agree that any selected "first chicken egg" came before any selected "first chicken" to be born from it.
The hardest part of this proposition is whether we can agree that the first chicken was born inside an egg. I propose that it must have been, by our own definitioms, because we widely agree that chickens are born from eggs. Not by any intrinsic property, but simply by our accepted definition of the word "chicken".
So any hypothetical chicken-ancestor we choose as the "first chicken", but not born from an egg, we should not be willing to call "first chicken", after all.
So we must proceed forward in time from that failed choice of "first chicken" until something sufficiently chicken-like is born from an egg. Then we can call that animal our "first chicken", and examine it's relationship to "chicken eggs". We will, by our method of searching, always then find that the "chicken egg" that our "first chicken" hatched from, came first.
It's specifically implied? :P
That is what I mean, the scooe of the question is too narrow.
"It's a thought experiment, there is no real answer, blah blah blah..."
The question is only deep among those who constrain themselves to what they believe the question asks, just widen the scope and you have the logical sollution.
The flaw of the question is assuming there is a clear dividing line between species. Evolutionary change is a continuous process. We only have dividing lines where we see differences in long dead ones in the fossil record, or we see enough differences in living ones. The question has no answer, only a long explanation of how that isn't how any of this works.
Then it just becomes a matter of word definitions.