Actually that pretty much sums up mutation in the parent sex cells leading to a qualitatively different offspring, hence the chicken egg came first. The egg is tied to the chick that comes from it in a way it need not be to the parent who laid it.
There were first members of new species, and they could not mate with their parents. The eggs of these new species were like other eggs of the new species and not like the eggs of the parents. The change happened in between.
If we are only talking about natural selection (or breeding), then the changes are merely incremental and your answer is fair enough, but that is not what people are concerned about when they ask the chicken and egg question. At least not most of them. They are wondering how a species got started since there needed to be a beginning, a line, and those lines are made between some extremely small minority of parents and their eggs or zygotes. Where the mutations in the parental sex cells - ones that did not make them into some other kind of creature - is the root of something new.
(and even in natural selection the egg will fit the chick better than the hen, puns on ‘fit’ not intended. Eggs came first for non-Abrahamics)
But all offspring are different from their parents. At least in species as high as chickens.
I would check the definition of “species” a little more closely if I were you.
Species become subspecies, races, breeds - and back again, sometimes. Check with the people who handle taxonomy. They often just vote. That’s because “species” is largely a convenience of nomenclature. Do you honestly think that one day, the first bird “evolved” from a dinosaur?
I’ve gotten this answer from evolutionary biologists.
Sure, but then again, if the cutoff is arbritrary, then it would still be the egg. People ask that question when they are a) concerned something impossible happened or b) when they think they have found a flaw in evolutionary theory and are either attacking or just concerned.
The way out of the dilemma is to notice that in the evolutionary chain changes will take place in between the parent and the egg. Obviously eggs came first since there were egg laying species before there were even birds. Wherever that point is where we decide there are chickens, now, it was a chicken egg that hatched them. It makes no sense to say that the chicken came before the egg. And whatever laid that egg was not quite a chicken.
Well, I guess your time away did not increase the liklihood of charitable reads of positions you disagree with. I liked you gone. I will foe you back away just for me personally, which it seems I can finally do, your grandfathered immunity no longer in place.
I must say however, that it never occurred to me that anyone would think impossible something that they also think actually happened. That’s a brain teaser…
I suspect that by definition, any egg that produces a chicken (by whatever definition) is a “chicken egg”.
But the problem is that any egg that is laid by a non-chicken (again, by whatever definition), is necessairly an egg of the non-chicken and thus a “non-chicken egg”.
So there is a definition problem involved. An egg gets laid that is both a chicken egg and a non-chicken egg.
You have to decide on how to define an egg; by the parent or by the product.
This is actually a causation question–If the chicken came first, where did it come from; if the egg came first, what animal laid it? Science ‘knows’ the chicken came from the archeopteryx, but so did birds in general. At some point in time a protochicken laid an egg in which a variation or mutation took place. The egg then hatched into a chicken rather than a protochicken. After enough chickeneggs were hatched, the new species were able to interbreed and might have taken over the world except Col. Sanders came along.
The dilemma is still philosophical/metaphysical, although circular. At some point, the circularity has to be broken by positing a certain set of probable parameters and then ‘proving’ the hypothetical. Since I’m not a creationist, I go along with the mutated egg theory.
And after that’s decided (and the decision, being a matter of definitions, is rather arbitrary) the question is answered.
If a chicken egg is an egg that produces a chicken, then the egg came first.
If a chicken egg is an egg that is laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first.
If a chicken egg is an egg that is both produced by a chicken and produces a chicken, then the egg came first.
If a chicken egg is an egg that is produced by a chicken or produces a chicken, then the chicken came first.
Take your pick, it doesn’t really matter which one, it’s just semantics.
If an approximate chicken laid an egg that produced a chicken proper, the egg came first.
If an approximate chicken didn’t produce eggs, but somehow gave birth to a chicken proper that did lay eggs, the chicken came first.
There’s probably other possibilities.
Unfortunately the answer to “Which came first? The chicken, the egg or the video camera?” is not the video camera. So I guess we’ll never have sufficient proof.
ADDENDUM: note that the question is “Which came first? The chicken or the egg?” not “Which came first? The chicken or the chicken egg?”
If you use the “and”, then neither can be claimed as first.
If you use the “or”, then both can claim to have come first.
But one and only one did come first.
Uh…they both make sense, after switching the end of them. Here’s the fixed version:
If a chicken egg is an egg that produces a chicken, then the egg came first.
If a chicken egg is an egg that is laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first.
If a chicken egg is an egg that is both produced by a chicken and produces a chicken, then the chicken came first.
If a chicken egg is an egg that is produced by a chicken or produces a chicken, then the egg came first.
I see what you meant. It was a language confusion; “chicken egg = produced by chicken” and also “chicken egg = produces a chicken”. Two definitions for the same word. But with your rewording you are saying, “chicken egg = an egg both produced by chicken as well as produces a chicken”.
This one still doesn’t seem to address the problem. You have stated what a chicken egg is, but you haven’t excluded other sources for the existence of a chicken.
The earlier statement (3) restricted the production of a chicken egg to something that can only come from a chicken, thus chicken, by definition came first.
The 4th statement allows for a chicken to be formed of something other than a chicken egg. You would have to also define a chicken as something that can only come from a chicken egg.