h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A chicken egg doesn't neccessarily need to be laid by a chicken. It is a chicken egg because a chicken lies therein, and the eggshell is 'property' of the chicken, not its parent. The 'proto-chicken' lays the egg of a species entirely separate, however similar, from/to itself. The sequence of events is as follows: Proto chicken, chicken egg, chicken. The egg in question is not a proto-chicken egg, but a chicken egg. When you pick up the egg, there is a chicken in your hand. It doesn't matter if it was created by a horse or a pile of stationery; it's a chicken.

One could even go on to say that eggs in general existed before either, such as a dinosaur or reptile egg, although that somewhat limits the question.

You've solved it! It's amazing how many people can't see that.

Caveat: we don't all agree on this.

It supposes that the changeover to 'chicken' was intantaneous, in one gene-mutation. I don't know the intricacies of evolutionary science but this does seem excessively simplified, a Reader's Digest version.

My own image (as Gno gnows) is of a species in flux for a number of generations; which is fairly instantaneous in evolutionary terms, but still covers a few chickens and eggs, rather than one.

much to short of attention spand to read entirely on the conflict @ this moment, so this might be redundant

If God had in fact created the egg first, there would be no chicken to sit upon the egg and keep it warm, meaning the egg would inevitably die.

And the biblical account does state that all animals were created, no that all animal precepts were created.

So in my mind, it is very reasonable to say that (from a purely religious point of view) the chicken came first.

You will appreciate no doubt that putting a religious point of view is not exactly a quiet or uncontroversial move.

It is not suitable to be offered as a gesture of pacific closure, for instance, however it may be intended.

Besides, however tongue in cheek this entry is, it is written in a scientific context.

I believe I may of been entirely misinterpreted

I personally agree with you explanation to the age old question

I was merely responding to one of the early posts in which a fellow replier choose to take a religous standing and yet left no conclusion to the entry

Ah. I'd forgotten the conversation had gone on longer than one page. Apologies.

No apologies needed

We both gained information from the exange, so in reality we should be thanking each other

Proof, idea and theories

It all starts with an idea. What if species evolve? Could it be true?
Then, Darwin (and others, including ourselves) started thinking about that, and couldn't find anything wrong with the idea. We found evidence that supported the idea, and we didn't find evidence that proved it wrong.
(Sidenote: all it takes is one piece of evidence to reduce an idea as bunk, it takes countless more to make a theory out of an idea)

And it is still a theory. It can only become fact (scientifically speaking here) if and when we manage to duplicate the process. Well, congrats Grand-Designfans, we can't. It takes WAY too long a time, with too many unforseen aspects to recreate it.
Remember, evolution is basically nothing more than luck. It's not a process of foreseeing a climate change and changing the DNA to grow more fur, it is a fault that makes an organism have more fur, and when the climate finally changes, the 'faulty' specimen becomes the dominating species, because the other specimens die of cold.

Quite. Darwin observed that, far from being elegant, the process of evolution is blind, wasteful and unimaginably cruel.

The results however can be stunningly elegant.

Your assertion that it cannot be repeated may be challenged, though; Darwin did a lot of pigeon-fancying, which repeats the moves of evolution (cutting off the progeny of deselected individuals) in an accelerated fashion.

Goyahkla,

In Science, a theory is an explanation that explains things well enough that everybody accepts it as fact. It is never possible to prove a theory, even if it is something obvious such as that day is caused by the sun coming up in the morning.

If there is not much evidence and not everybody accepts it, it is called a hypothesis. Evolution was accepted by just about everybody many, many years ago.

for a long while i have had the same thoughts as the orignal post, the egg must have come first. Reading some of these entries though its become clear that infact it is still an unanswerable question, a new species does not develop over 1 generation, and new species cannot develop in one mutation either. Therefore the timeless question of which came first is safe in the fact that there is no answer!!!

pacmac

the question we should be asking is at what point does the modern day chicken become different enough from olden day chicken to constitute a different species, along these grounds the protochicken egg and the chicken that hatched from is where to draw the line, so again the egg comes first..
pacmac

I agree with you in post 72. Change can take place comparatively quickly, but not in one generation. In evoutionary scale the chicken and the egg are one individual, and one individual does not constitute a species.

The egg came first because dinosaurs were around before chickens an they laid eggs.Acctually now that i think about it fish and plants have eggs as well.

(is hammondorgan around?)

The above loops us back to post 61

This is all well and good, however you are not considering the "what constitutes an egg" question deeply enough. say a proto chicken lays an egg... Something causes a mutation, and the modern chicken is brought about. Since it was called a prto-chicken egg right up until the mutation caused it to be a chicken inside rather then a proto-chicken, niether came first. When the chicken mutated, the egg became a chicken egg. CONCLUSION: The chicken and the egg came about at precisely the same moment!

Good one.

This raises the question of who the egg belongs to, does it belong to the proto chicken that laid the egg, or to the baby chicken inside the egg. In the first case it is a protochicken egg, from which a chicken hatched ( e.g. the chicken came first ) In the second case it is a chicken egg laid by a protochicken ( e.g. the egg came first )

That could be argued, but really it just goes to show (if we didn't already know) that this whole question is merely a splitting of hairs.

Was it a chicken egg? Yes.
Was it a protochicken egg? Yes.
Was it two different things then? If you like, why not?