this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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At which point does an egg of non-chicken become an egg of chicken?
Chickenness is a spectrum, not a binary
Is archeopteryx a chicken?
If I say no, are you going to pick the next most recent named ancestor of the chicken, and keep repeating until someone says yes?
Maybe
That was the original question
I've never seen one run from a fight.
That's quite controversial.
Is a "chicken egg" an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that will hatch into a chicken?
It's an egg that will hatch into a chicken, since the "first" chicken must have hatched out of an egg that was laid and fertilized by two "non-chickens" whose DNA combined together to make a full-blown chicken. Of course it wasn't actually just one egg, but really, no matter how you think about it, the egg came first.
Can mutations that occurred during life be transmitted to offspring? Biology classes were a long time ago.
That depends on what you mean.
Did a giraffe stretch its neck longer and longer, and then pass that long-necked gene onto its kids? No.
Can an embryo that gets a random mutation while developing in the egg/womb pass it on to their children? Yes.
This gets a bit more complicated if you really dig into it, though. Environment does change the expression of genes, and that particular sequence of genes that have been activated/shut-off/whatever can be passed on to children too.
Hence why children who were born to two shorter parents will often grow much taller than them if given much better nutrition. Or why obesity often shows up chronically in families that were poor or had limited access to healthier foods in other ways; their bodies had adapted to grab and store every extra calorie they could to guard against starvation, and unfortunately shutting that gene expression off naturally takes multiple generations.
This was a fascinating comment to read, thanks for posting 🙂
Yes, that's the driving force of evolution.
I agree, and I've made the same argument. It's perfectly valid, Unless the egg belongs to the creature who laid it, instead of the creature that hatched from it.
If the egg in question is a "proto-chicken's egg" because it was laid by a proto-chicken, then the chicken would have come before the chicken egg.
No it wouldn't. If we're going to talk about the creation of chickens as happening at a single instance of egg-laying, the two progenitors of said first chicken would be proto-chickens whose DNA combined in the fertilized egg to make, for the first time ever, a chicken. Yes, it's a chicken egg, because it contains a chicken, but it's also a proto-chicken's egg because it wasn't laid by a full chicken. It couldn't have been, they didn't exist yet.
There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.
By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.
Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn't be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.
The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.
I can’t believe I’m actually reading this thread.
Discourse as old as time, song as old as rhyme, chicken or the egg.
No, if a chicken could hatch out of it, regardless of whether or not it actually did, it's a chicken egg. Nothing else could hatch out of it and it didn't somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn't hatch.
Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.
Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a "Shicken", if I hadn't eaten it first. But, because there was never a "Shicken", there could never be a "Shicken" egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.
No, the shicken egg was a shicken egg even prior to you eating it. The act of giving it a name is irrelevant. The proto-chicken could've lain a hundred eggs, each becoming a new "chicken". If 99 of them die off and are never born then that does not mean they didn't exist. It just means they did not exist in a way where we could've given them a name.
Feel like any kind of mutation that turns the pre chicken into the proto chicken happens at birth, if the pre chicken had a mutated offspring, I'd wager the egg is mutated significantly from what a normal pre chicken egg would be, since after all it has to support a proto chicken, not a pre chicken.
The former, otherwise it would be "chicken's egg".
Incorrect, a "chicken's egg" would be an egg in the possession of a chicken, which would be the egg a chicken lays. The "first chicken" did not hatch out of an egg laid by a chicken because they didn't exist.
You're right. I just realized that I typed the opposite of what I meant. And then in another comment said what you did thinking I was defending my og opinion. I'm all over the place this morning.
Amy is a chicken. Amy lays an egg. Brenda is a chicken. Brenda hatched from the egg Amy laid. The egg in question is clearly a chicken's egg, but is it Amy's egg, or Brenda's egg?
It was Amy's egg that Brenda inherited, so now it's Brenda's egg. So the OG egg was Amy's.
I think it's an egg laid by a chicken. Unfertilized eggs laid by chickens that will never become chickens are still chicken eggs.
That's about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken's egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn't become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.
I feel like my comment in another thread is even more relevant here:
I have no direct knowledge about that, but if we take the analogy of the egg (shell, albumen and yolk sack) being the life-support system of the embryo during gestation, in humans the placenta would be a big part of that, and exactly whose body it is part of its not simple (from what I remember both mother and child contribute cells, and the 'plan' for building it comes from the father's genes). So maybe for chickens it could be ambiguous whether the shell 'belongs' to the laying generation or the hatching one. Seems like mostly a human taxonomy distinction to make anyway, obviously it's in between the two, but we like to draw the line somewhere.
When first chicken lay egg, duh!
Unless you define a chicken egg as an egg of which a chicken is born (or of which a chicken could be born)
Doesn't matter as it's not a stated in the question. It just needs to be an egg.
Wherever humans draw the line. The meme uses the assumption that there is a clear change from earlier species to later descendants, when it reality it is a continuous change of many characteristics each time an individual reproduces and spreads their genetics. It's the flaw of the missing link argument.
When genetic mutation happened between non-chicken and its egg to create real chicken