Scientifically, I believe the egg came first.
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Scientifically, I believe the egg came first.
Okay, then scientifically....where did the egg come from in the first place? And whom or what "incubated" the egg until it hatched?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
It'd help to know why this is in D & D instead of General Chat. Is this a trick question and you have something particular in mind? :noob:
The heart of the question is unanswerable.
Dinosaurs had eggs before chicken existed.
So the dinosaur came before the egg?Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
^^Pretty much.
Didn't life on this planet begin as microscopic life? So the actual chicken/dinosaur/whatever would have come first as evolution took its course.
Question solved, close thread :downcast: (or was it this one that everone likes using: :o ?)
That wasn't the question.Quote:
Originally Posted by Draco
That's the canonical correct answer; two non-chickens met and conspired, but managed to produce an egg with a monster, in this case a chicken, inside. If someone in the audience is a Marxist (or the be precise, a Lysenkovite), they'd probably say good parents beat their child long enough for them to turn into a chicken.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Eggs in general came before chickens even if you think of chickens as dinosaurs. This is really weird, this very issue totally polarised our party last night and some people said they'd seen some documentary that'd answered the question in favour of the chickens, but it sounded fishy to me.
The problem is that the definition of a species is somewhat up in the air, so in my answer I implicitly assumed the existence of barely-but-just-not chickens to lay the first chicken egg; these BBJN-chickens are what, exactly?, and there had to have been at least two monster-chickens randomly hatched around the same couple of years to produce fully chicken off-spring. Evolution works in time-scales that rather dismiss individual generations.
Of course in the case of God we were able to bypass the question by saying that it's beyond the limits of science.
America better elect Michele; I really want to ask Jesse about this whole baryogenesis business :mad:
How? This is completely relevant, an egg cannot exist with an organism to lay it.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Ok, but even on a generational timescale, the mechanism we understand as the egg came before the species we understand as the chicken. I believe this and the analogous processes will hold true at least until we move the process back to the cloning methods of reproduction like fragmentation. Done as a philosophical experiment, the literal answer is plainly "it depends on your parameters" and the non-literal answer could be almost anything since the metaphor can be applied fairly broadly.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nessus
I want to congratulate you on the most obscure sentence I've read in weeks. That whole thing about opaque thoughts really stuck, huh?Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Nessus got it straight away: Barely but just not chicken - Good phrase!Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Because it was a genuine question that I thought could provide (and already has provided) some serious debate and discussion.Quote:
It'd help to know why this is in D & D instead of General Chat. Is this a trick question and you have something particular in mind? :noob:
For the purposes of this thread: Chicken eggs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Flixy
My answer, which Nessus almost exactly hit:
Scientifically: Evolution occurs due to genetic mutations, those mutations primarily occur at conception, so the first "chicken" that could be recognised - if we could trace that - would have been hatched from an egg by its genetic predecessor.
Theologically: God created the animals, that then started to reproduce. So theologically IMO the chicken would have come first.
I'm a scientist and not a Christian.
Well, just to annoy you with semantics, is a chicken egg defined as an egg that drops out of a chicken, or as an egg that contains a chicken? If it's the first, the chicken came before the chicken egg. :p
I would say an egg that contains a chicken.
If at one stage the parents of a chicken were not chickens (for the sake of evolutionarily drawing a line) but the egg that hatched had a chicken in it, then surely that egg must have been a chicken egg as it had a chicken inside, irrespective of what laid it.
Oh really?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
but science can't tell you when a chicken becomes a person
You sure know how to throw a raging party, Minxy. So much for my fantasy of partying it up in Sweden with a bunch of gorgeous, drunk Swedish chicks, if all you guys do is talk about poultry documentaries into the wee hours. :pQuote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
It was a very brief polarisation, the rest of the night was spend making/consuming mountains of sushi and chocolate truffles to good music. We're grown-ups now, we're allowed to philosophise at parties without feeling embarrassed :noob:
The real meaning behind the phrase is a question of causality, not a question about chickens and eggs. The question wrongly assumes you need a chcken to make a chicken egg, and that you need a chicken egg to make a chicken. The second, I suppose is true, but the first is not. I guess niether are really true, right, we could theoretically engineer one without use of an egg. Then in that case the chicken would have come first.
Back to the question taken at face value, even though i don't think that's the point of the question. Then evolutionarily speaking, LIKELY the egg came first, because it could be possible that the first chicken was not born of an egg. Perhaps the predecessor to the chicken could reproduce in more than one way, one by laying eggs, another by incubation in the womb. This is possible, so it would depend on how it happened, Likely it was an egg, and the BBJN could only reproduce by laying eggs.
Bolded the weakest link.Quote:
It is an age-old riddle that has perplexed generations: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Now British scientists claim to have finally come up with the definitive answer: The chicken.
The scientific and philosophical mystery was purportedly unraveled by researchers at Sheffield and Warwick universities, according to the Daily Mail newspaper.
The scientists found that a protein found only in a chicken's ovaries is necessary for the formation of the egg, according to the paper Wednesday. The egg can therefore only exist if it has been created inside a chicken.
The protein speeds up the development of the hard shell, which is essential in protecting the delicate yolk and fluids while the chick grows inside the egg, the report said.
"It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first," said Dr. Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University's Department of Engineering Materials, according to the Mail.
"The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation, but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process," he said.
Professor John Harding, from the same department, said the discovery could have other uses, according to the Daily Mail.
"Understanding how chickens make egg shells is fascinating in itself but can also give clues towards designing new materials and processes," he said.
"Nature has found innovative solutions that work for all kinds of problems in materials science and technology — we can learn a lot from them."
The discovery was revealed in the paper Structural Control Of Crystal Nuclei By An Eggshell Protein.
A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face and the egg is frowning and looking a bit pissed off. The egg mutters, to no-one in particular, "Well, I guess we answered that age-old question!"
I knew you were going to say that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nessus
No, not really. Not in a "I wear a lab coat and conduct scientific experiments" kind of way, it is not my job - though I've often wished it was, I was very, very torn which to study between economics and physics when I went to uni. I just meant I believe in, have a strong interest in, like to follow etc science and have no belief in theology.
Looks like you made the right call, given that the world today doesn't seem to need scientists (or science), just bankers and banks.
I believe science to be more important. It is through technological progress that we get long-term economic growth.
Science is the number one most important thing for humanity.
Their argument follows thusly: they have proof that you NEED a chicken to make a chicken egg. Which means this first chicken that laid that egg was not born of an egg. Or else that contradicts our assumption that only a chicken can make a chicken egg. So I was wise to use the word likely.
Is it really safe to assume that without that protein a chicken can't be born out of an egg.. no way no how.
I'd say philosophy, science is a subset of it.Quote:
Science is the number one most important thing for humanity.
If only your opinion was more common.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
At any rate, I've contributed to some research with fairly direct applications, so even I can't hide behind an academic's veil of non-commercialism.
Still, I think it's OK to be a little embarrassed when one of the memorable moments of your party was the polarizing discussion of that poultry documentary.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
Quote:
Originally Posted by RandBlade
Wait, I've heard of that... it's called, uh... science-ology, I think. Never would have pegged you for a science-ologist, though. :downcast: