The problem with this question is that its assumption is so wrong that it is rebdered meaningless. Chomsky once wrote the sentence “Colorless greed ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that has syntactic correctness but no semantic meaning. Also, why a chicken, in particular? Why this animal who has been so successfully domesticated and differentially bred over centuries that calling it out is like Roy Confort calling out the similarly domesticated banana as evidence of god and creation?
In any case, eggs came first. The egg, if you will, is basically a big cell. It has a lot going on, but it got figured out long before modern birds, much less the domesticated chicken.
But of course, that’s not what they really mean. What they really mean is - how do you get from not-chicken to chicken without the biological equivalent of a big bang (and I’m not even touching on how cosmogenesis gets misunderstood)?
And the real answer is that, whether we’re talking about natural or human driven evolution, there’s no line between chicken and not-chicken. Its fairly easy for us to say that a cat is not a chicken and that a jellyfish is not a chicken, but as you get into the later dinosaurs and early birds, you start to move into grey areas.
Which brings us back around to semantics. As humans, for some reason, we like hard categories around things. That’s often not how the real world works. There’s really a lot of just continuous blessings, and ideas like species are a convenient label for us to understand gross differences but whose utility starts to fall apart once too closely examined. The definitions written in textbooks for high school students are unhelpful, as they represent the ideas as if they were handed down from on high, rather than “this is a convenient way of organizing things for some of our purposes.”
I don’t think the question had to be about chickens. It could be about anything. Just a lot of people have chickens and therefore eggs. It could be about any animal.
Well that’s why it’s a philosophical(?) question. Yes evolution made the chicken, but what would you call what laid that egg if not a chicken first?
If it wasn’t a chicken that laid it, it’s not a chicken egg, so the egg couldn’t come first. What hatched would be a chicken and it would than lay chicken eggs.
What comes between chickens and their non-chicken ancestors? The problem is in our human need to classify everything into different neat boxes, when it's an actual long and continuous process. In short, the "dilemma" created is more of an argument about what separates species, and that's a hell of a rabbit hole with no single answer.
But the answer is the egg, since a chicken born from that egg is different than its parents.
You're right in that it's not meant to have an answer as it's normally told philosophically. But the biological and evolutionary answer is that there is no dividing line to give that answer because species don't change with individuals but with large populations over great amounts of time. We see those lines because we find fossils of things related to but different enough to others to call them a different name. And the real mind blower is that almost all creatures that did exist never left fossils to find.
The false dilemma of the chicken and the egg shares the same misunderstanding that the "missing link" fallacy does. There's no line between things except over time and thousands of generations.
Proto-chicken laid the egg. It was a proto-chicken egg. The creature that came out of it had enough genetic variance to be defined as a full chicken.
Note, the question does not ask “what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?” It’s just “the egg”. It doesn’t matter what type of egg, as long as a chicken came out of it.
chicken would also be able to defined as it’s ancestor
This isn’t the case, and there’s a mathematical theorem describing this called the Intermediate Value Theorem. Basically, if you have a function describing a line you can draw without picking up your pencil, at some point along that line the value takes on every value on that line. Makes sense, right?
If I draw a line separating Chicken-birds from Not-chicken-birds, and show the evolutionary path leading from non-chicken to chicken, at some point it crosses that line. We don’t have to know where that point is, we just know it crosses the line at some point.
At that point, wherever it is, we have a bird that meets the criteria of “chicken” hatching from an egg laid by a bird that doesn’t.
Besides, this is all pretty moot. We actually know when and where chickens originated. They originated about 3000 years ago in China and India after being domesticated from Southeast Asian Red Junglefowl.
The only wrinkle is that biologists might decide, presumably on genetic simularity, that red junglefowls and chickens are still the same species, like has been done with dogs and wolves.
That would mean the chicken came first, because it was the taming that made it a chicken.
In such a case, we would simply need to look backward in history until we find an ancestor that doesn’t meet the chicken criteria. Fowl as a clade were separated from other bird clades before the K-T Extinction Event, and many such species before the event had teeth, which means they weren’t chickens.
I don’t think you can use the Intermediate Value Theorem to answer this. If taxonomists can entirely agree on one single path at each and every stage of evolution, the singular point of where an egg is now defined as a chicken egg where the egg that the creature which laid it hatched from is not a chicken egg–or vice versa, where a creature which is now defined as a chicken where its parents are not chickens–cannot be objectively determined. They’re human-defined lines, which makes this entirely a human philosophy problem in the first place.
(EDIT: messed up the formatting of this image) I like this analogy here:
It’s not completely relevant to this discussion, but it has some good points here. We can all agree that, at some point, it stopped being one color and started being another, but any method we use to draw that line would be arbitrary anyway. Maybe you take the hex code and find the point where the blue value is greater than the red value, but where is the text purple? Does purple even exist under this definition? Or maybe the text is red when, say, the hex for red is 80+% the total color value, blue for the opposite case, and purple for the in-between cases? But then, why 80% and not 90%? This is starting to sound really pretentious, but my point here is that in agreement to your last point, there’s no correct scientific answer to this problem.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course it does.
I see what you’re saying, and I agree with it, but the question isn’t asking “Which egg was the first chicken egg?”, it’s asking “Did the egg come before the chicken?” Determining the exact point is a way of answering the question, but is a lot of work that isn’t strictly necessary to do so.
We can use the Theorem because we don’t care when that point actually was, the question doesn’t ask that. We just need to prove that there was such a point, and the Theorem does that.
To use that text as an analogy, we don’t care which is the first purple or blue word, we just know there is one because the gradient starts from red, passes through purple, and ends up blue, so it must have a first purple word and a first blue word.
Sure, but if you’re using the IVT as a proof that there was a point where there was indeed a “first chicken egg”, you still haven’t answered whether the first chicken egg came before the first chicken. Clearly there was a first egg and there was a first chicken, IVT proves this, but which came first? This depends on those definitions. We’d need to find exactly where it “passes over”, which could depend on who you ask.
If you define a chicken as hatching from a chicken egg (“every chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg”), then the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken (“all chicken eggs must have been laid by chickens”), then the chicken came first. And notice how these definitions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, leading to this whole philosophical issue in the first place.
If, in a much more extremely broad sense, we’re asking which came first, chickens or eggs in general, then I think we could agree that eggs came first, as I believe creatures were laying eggs long before the first “chicken” emerged, for most definitions of “chicken”.
We’d need to find exactly where it “passes over”, which could depend on who you ask.
No, we don’t. It doesn’t matter when that is, because you and I both agree that it’s out there somewhere, and that at the point in time referenced, a non-chicken laid an egg and a chicken hatched out of it. That’s all we need out of that point, and neither of us are disputing that part of it.
If you define a chicken as hatching from a chicken egg (“every chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg”), then the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken (“all chicken eggs must have been laid by chickens”), then the chicken came first.
Agreed. I, personally, use the broader egg definition you reference in the last paragraph, but a definition of “chicken egg” would put the whole thing to rest, and I propose this: Not every chicken egg contains a viable chicken. We all agree that these eggs are still chicken eggs when we buy them at the supermarket, though, so my proposed definition is that a chicken egg is laid by a chicken. Otherwise, we end up with unclassified eggs in our omelettes, and we can’t have that.
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