• schmidtster@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Well that’s why it’s a philosophical(?) question. Yes evolution made the chicken, but what would you call what laid that egg if not a chicken first?

      If it wasn’t a chicken that laid it, it’s not a chicken egg, so the egg couldn’t come first. What hatched would be a chicken and it would than lay chicken eggs.

      • Rhaedas@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        What comes between chickens and their non-chicken ancestors? The problem is in our human need to classify everything into different neat boxes, when it’s an actual long and continuous process. In short, the “dilemma” created is more of an argument about what separates species, and that’s a hell of a rabbit hole with no single answer.

        But the answer is the egg, since a chicken born from that egg is different than its parents.

        • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          But a chicken didn’t lay that egg, so it’s not a chicken egg. That’s the crux of the paradox.

          There is no answer is the answer.

          • Rhaedas@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            You’re right in that it’s not meant to have an answer as it’s normally told philosophically. But the biological and evolutionary answer is that there is no dividing line to give that answer because species don’t change with individuals but with large populations over great amounts of time. We see those lines because we find fossils of things related to but different enough to others to call them a different name. And the real mind blower is that almost all creatures that did exist never left fossils to find.

            The false dilemma of the chicken and the egg shares the same misunderstanding that the “missing link” fallacy does. There’s no line between things except over time and thousands of generations.

  • foggy@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Two answer.

    “Chicken” comes before “or the egg.”

    Or

    Whatever layed the first chicken egg was not itself a chicken, but a few tweaks of the genome away. I this regard, the real answer is “The egg.”

    • Thranduil@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The egg since eggs existed long before the first chicken. Since the question does not specify it HAS to be a “chicken egg” just egg

    • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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      11 months ago

      Definitely the correct answer.

      Unless scientists decide chickens are still the same species as their wild counterpart (the red junglefowl), like with dogs and arguably pigs.

      Probably won’t bother, honestly.

  • MrGerrit@feddit.nl
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    11 months ago

    Long before the chickens roam the earth, there were the dinosaurs that laid eggs.

    So eggs came before the chicken.

  • Russianranger@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Easily explained. God is actually a giant chicken and laid the egg. What you see here is the universe being served sunny side up. I’ll see myself out