The egg came first

I'd say the question is unanswerable.Take your Rhode Island Red. Imagine a million year string of its ancestry (or whatever figure gets you to a suitably pre-chicken critter). Now, think about what happened along that line. At no time did an animal give birth to anything significantly different than itself. Minor differences, yes; but no differences so large as to place the offspring in a different species. At no time is an egg significantly different than it predecessor. Over many generations you can see major changes, but not over one generation and to answer the chicken/egg question the change would have to be over one generation.

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I honestly don't know what you mean. I don't know the notation.

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Creatures were laying eggs long before there was anything resembling a chicken. That is an interesting take. It denies the implicit, I think, assumption that the egg in the question is a chicken egg.Your answer wouldn't work if the question were explicitly "Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?"

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It depends. What is the definition of a "chicken egg"? Is a chicken egg an egg that is laid by a chicken, or an egg that produces a chicken? In the former case, the chicken came first; in the latter case, the egg came first.

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Not really. There is never a point at which a non-chicken gives birth to a chicken egg, or visa-versa. For such to happen we'd have a 'hopeful monster' situation. That was the point I made in post #15. EvC Forum: The egg came first

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changing egg to chicken-egg begs the question

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No it doesn't.You could have a non-chicken lay a chicken egg and thus have the egg come first and the chicken second. Or you could have a non-chicken lay a non-chicken egg from which a chicken hatched, and thus you have the chicken first and the egg second. What my provision does is disqualify that non-chicken egg. Without that provision the egg quite clearly wins.

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at some point the species that lays the egg is 99.999% chicken but the egg is 100%

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There is no such thing as 100% pure chicken, or 100% pure any-other-species. There is always variation.

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and the offspring can mate with the 99.999% and other 100% chickens.

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Then all are the same species. If they are all the same species, you haven't solved the 'which came first' problem. To solve the problem you'd have to find a sharp delineation between chicken and non-chicken (or species-a and species-b), whether that line be at the egg or at the bird, within one generation. My point is that you will never find that sharp line. One generation will always be able to mate with the generation before and the one after it.

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how, other than the proverbial hopeful monster?

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Exactly. You would have a hopeful monster. However, if it happened the other way-- a non-chicken laying a chicken egg-- you still have a hopeful monster. That is why I call the question unanswerable.

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That is true of any species in transition, which happens to include all species that ever existed.

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Exactly.

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Each generation to generation sequence in the same species by definition, unless you have a generation of hopeful monsters all in one whack.

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Exactly.

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The distinctions are arbitrary and problematical, but they are useful to describe sufficient change over time to be noticeably different.

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Yes. These are all the reasons I find the question unanswerable.

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Or do you think species should only be drawn when there is a clear branching?

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I am not using any odd definition of species or of branching. What I am saying is that to decisively answer the 'which came first' question you'd have to have a hopeful monster type of event, which I do not think has ever happened nor will ever happen. Therefore, the question cannot be answered (unless one allows that 'the egg' mean 'the first appearance of an egg of any sort anywhere on Earth').The question asks for an answer in a format that doesn't apply-- like 'Which is better, red or blue?'. There really isn't an answer.

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Assume some arbitrary dividing line where by one animal is not quite chicken, and its descendant is a chicken.

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This is where the argument goes wrong. The dividing line is entirely arbitrary and basically meaningless. A not-quite-chicken can't birth a chicken. Sure, the two vary genetically just a bit but the offspring of an animal is so close genetically to its parents that it must be considered the same species by any rational definition of species.Say animal-A lays an egg. This egg is animal-B. Now, animal-B is perfectly capable of mating with animal-A and with countless other animals in animal-A's (and in its own) generation. Not to mention that it could mate with animals from many many previous generations. This means that by a pretty standard definition of species-- marked by a population's ability to mate producing viable offspring-- animal-B is the SAME species as animal-A. That being the case, animal-B cannot be the first of the species and if it isn't the first of the species then there must be some other animal, of the same species, which hatched from some other egg, before it in time. So you step back in time-- same problem. You'll never find more than an arbitrary place to draw the line and if we are going for arbitrary, all bets are off.In other words, to find out which came first you'd have to find THE first in order to find out which came first and there isn't ever really a first.

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Who says so, and why not?

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You have my argument. It is a pretty simple argument based in basic genetics.

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See above, each mule or liger is a "first" in that they are completely independant of all other occurances of the same.

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Mules and ligers are also infertile. Should our chicken have begun this way, it would have been both the first and the last of its kind. This is clearly not what happened. Forgive me for asking you to keep the argument in the real world.

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Two birds,neither of which was chicken, could have mated to produce a chicken.

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This is terrible genetics. How many species of multi-cellular animal can you name that actually began this way? Now if the question involved bacteria, you might have a case. Two apes hooked up and out came a human? No. It doesn't work that way. The only way this works is if your non-chicken birds were so genetically close to being chickens that they are indistinguishable from chickens and at that point my previous argument applies. They would be the same species, and hence the offspring would not be the first.

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Just to be clear, I intend this to be one method of respectful conclusion when people disagree.

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Understood. I hope you did not sense any animosity from me.

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I am not certain where to look, but I will suspend my responses until I find something new.

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Please return to the discussion when you can.

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