The egg came first

Released from Th egg came first. --AdminAs I perused some threads of this forum I found a reference to the old questions of Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I don’t know where, but some time in the past I read a good logical answer to this question. Note that my version may contain technical errors not present in the original. Blame me, not the original.Evolution, with regards to one individual at a time, is when the descendent obtains an inheritable trait that is not possessed by the parent. The traits of each individual are established when the sperm and egg join and they have completed their genetic combination to form the complete set of DNA within the egg. After this process completes, the DNA, or the traits, of the individual are set for life.Therefore, the new trait is present first in the egg. Although the dividing line between the very first chicken and the something else that was its immediate predecessor is certainly a very broad and fuzzy one, the individual that was first worthy of the name chicken became worthy of that name as an egg.Therefore the egg came first.

The way I've always answered the question:

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Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

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is it depends on your definition of a chicken egg. Is it an egg that came out of a chicken or an egg that has a chicken in it? You've defined the chicken egg as an egg with a chicken in it, so I'll agree that the egg came first. But that egg was laid by the something else that was its immediate predecessor, so it could be considered to not be a chicken egg, which could be used to say the chicken came first, but whatever.

Ha! Brilliant post.

I think we've found randman's transitional form.

I don't get it.

randman has demanded ad nauseam the "transitional" species, essentially wanting evidence of one species giving birth to another. If the first chicken in an egg was not an egg from a chicken...voila!Sorry if it was lame, CS.

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But that egg was laid by the something else that was its immediate predecessor, so it could be considered to not be a chicken egg...

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Well, if you really want to get technical, we could say that the newly fertilized zygote is a chicken but not yet an egg. After some hours or days inside its parent it becomes an egg, is laid, incubate, hatches and is a chicken.However, that is not the sense of the question. There is such a thing as getting too technical and loosing sight of the goal of the question.As the question is generally asked, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?", the egg is the immediate predecessor of the chicken and the chicken comes from the egg. (And of course, the chicken is the predecessor of the egg, but only if the predecessor is indeed a chicken.) It really doesn't matter what the parent is or was. Consider this absurd proposition: Imagine that turkey's zygote happened to undergo a massive genetic change as compared to its parent and became a chicken. The effect would be that the turkey laid an egg, the egg hatched, and the creature that emerged was a chicken. The clear conclusion would be that the egg came first.I used zygote just now to prevent confusion, but consider a mammal. There is no egg in the sense of an entity with a shell, but there is indeed an egg. When the egg has a genetic change from its parents, the egg is the new and changed entity with the new inheritable characteristics and the egg is the first entity worth of being called the new species. The egg comes first.

You are saying that the egg came first. I suspect that a creationist would say that the chicken came first.So that old "chicken and egg" question is really an early form of the argument between evolution and creationism

Which is exactly what you did in the opening post.I think the question is intended to be paradoxical and is asking how can you have an egg without a chicken to lay it and how can you have a chicken without and egg to hatch from. When you start talking about evolution and completing a set of DNA you've already gotten too technical.This is why, when confronted with the question, I ask for some clarification in the definion of the word egg(I know what they mean by chicken) because it can be ambiguous. Is it, which came first:the chicken or the chicken's egg?orthe chicken or the egg's chicken?The answer to both of these questions is obvious. Leave out the clarification and the question becomes ambiguous, as it is trying to be a paradox.

Well, they've found a way to settle it (link)

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You are saying that the egg came first. I suspect that a creationist would say that the chicken came first.

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Of course they would, they’re always wrong.Warning, incoming heavy artillery!

Not necessarily true.Say that a doomsday machine goes off and jackets the Earth with radiation. The radiation would kill off many species and could easily mutate an animal, either causing radiation sickness or creating a new species out of the old one. In this case, the chicken came first.

Um, unless your mutant can reproduce, and can transmit its aquired mutations, then it's not coming first.It's all that's coming.

I liked the one where the chicken is in bed with the egg and smoking, and the egg is glowering ...caption "well I guess we know who came first ..."

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

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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