Comments on: It’s settled: the egg came before the chicken.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:46:06 +0000

Well, not too forward. It’s solved now.

Also, “If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?” Is also solvable.

It just depends on what you mean by ‘sound.’ If you mean the qualia of sound, no, because there’s no ears or brains to create such. If you mean the trigger of the qualia – the soundwaves – then yes it does. And so on.

By: David Michael

David Michael — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:04:19 +0000

I think I’m coming round to your point of view, actually. I was probably a shade forward in saying that I’d definitely found the solution in my post. Perhaps, as you say, it’s basically a matter of chance. In which case, the chicken egg may have come before the chicken, while not excluding the possibility that the eagle came before the eagle egg.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:03:23 +0000

I think you’re confusing what’s practical to what’s logically justifiable.

“Vast majority of chickens” presupposes some criteria for selecting chickens. We have to have a working definition already or we can’t separate chickens from non-chickens.

Also, the features are continuous, not binary. For instance, technology. Clearly, humans have a qualitatively different grasp of technology. But even crows have basic technology. As a result, all the chicken features are probably present in the pre-chicken, but at slightly lower (or higher) levels. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like the story of a non-chicken producing a chicken egg; the difference is practically infinitesimal at this ‘transition.’

Actually, having written it down I realized that I don’t fully understand my own idea. Supposedly the chicken and egg arises simultaneously, but this is clearly not the case.

First attempt at repair: It means there is one process – chicken-egg – that arises, once, that has the features of eggs and chickens. Since the possibility of eggs and chickens arises simultaneously, which came first was basically a matter of chance.

Of course the chicken-egg process is itself just a feature of a larger process, and so on.

By: David Michael

David Michael — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:21:00 +0000

A hard cut-off is certainly difficult, I grant you. But the thing is, it’s surely possible at least in theory. We know that somewhere along the line in the evolution of the chicken, it became what we know as the modern chicken: in other words, the “prototype” by which we measure all other chickens. Of course, there are bound to be mutations after this prototype first appears, but since these mutations weren’t successful (because the domestication of chickens means there’s less need to change), they don’t become part of the prototype. We can work out the prototype by checking what features the vast majority of chickens have in common. The previous form of the chicken might be one that had all these features except one. If such a calculation were possible (I’m no expert in evolutionary biology), I think it might be possible to say the egg came first.

Your own “chicken-egg identity theory” is interesting, however. I take it that the consequence is that it’s impossible to work out which came first? This may of course be true, but perhaps equally difficult to prove.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:55:30 +0000

I have to disagree because the definition of ‘chicken’ is pretty much arbitrary. The chickenness of that genetic line varies continuously and so a hard cutoff is of necessity probabilistic at best.

I’d propose instead that the chicken and egg are both merely products of an underlying process, the chicken-egg process. This process cannot arise with spawning both chickens and eggs.

A physical realization of the concept ‘chicken’ cannot exist without the concept ‘chicken-egg.’ Thus, in a sense, a chicken is an egg, and an egg is a chicken.