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Just so there's no confusion (lemmy.ml)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/funny@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 66 points 8 months ago (23 children)

A chicken egg came before the chicken because it is the same animal and the egg stage is earlier than the adult stage.

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  • [–] 53 points 8 months ago (14 children)

    TIL the first chicken egg wasn't laid by a chicken

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  • [–] 66 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    All mutations are birthed by the unmutated.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    if you want something crazier, look into ring species. where different species of animals have all their in-between species still alive and mate with each other, but the ones at the extremes cant mate with each other

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Yeah one of my favorite ones is how donkeys and horses can mate for mules but some of those mules will be able to make with either eachother or one of the two parent species but not both, but most mules are infertile.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Proto-chicken>chicken>eschato-chicken

    Chickens have "evolved" in recent years more than recent centuries

    We just keep the chicken name but at what point do they become a different animal.

    Evolution is slow and has no definite point in time of "First official example of a 2000s definition of a chicken"

    It's similar to the paradox of the heap.

    Of course a "chicken" layed the first chicken egg. But if we called that "chicken" a chicken then her egg would be the first chicken egg. Not the one she just layed.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Yeah it's an arbitrary line. Slow changes generation after generation, but where normally those changes balance out (a tall person is not much more likely to reproduce with tall people than short people), when a trait is advantageous/disadvantageous to survival or reproduction or encourages those with it to only reproduce with others with it sometimes it tilts the scales and slowly a proto deer/horse finds itself increasingly adapted to water to the point its leg bones become vestigial

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    The proto-chicken was a mutant Red Junglefowl. Just like a proto-dog was a mutant wolf.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You do not get a Red Junglefowl laying a 2000s definition of a chicken egg. You get a Red Junglefowl laying an egg with a mutation that that "Red Junglefowl" will pass on.

    Every generation the Red Junglefowl becomes closer to the 2000s definition of a chicken.

    It wasn't a "mutant" in the sense that one Red Junglefowl was born to create the chicken egg what we know as a 2000s definition of a chicken.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Yeah, there's never a hard dividing line between a species and its immediate predecessor. Merely a gradual chain of mutations that eventually results in distinct populations. If those populations can't successfully interbreed even if transported to meet, they're different species. The definitions for asexually reproducing organisms are even more fuzzy. This concept that taxonomy doesn't have fixed divisions confuses a lot of anti-evolutionists.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Even that isn't really clear in practice as I understand it. The genetic drift from proto chicken to chicken likely means that there is no single instance of proto chicken birthing chicken, even if you could fully sequence the DNA of every proto chicken. It's kind of an inconvenient issue with DNA taxonomy, because if we really did have that full DNA history, there would likely be several different populations with overlapping genetics and we might actually choose to draw that line for a number of different mutation combinations when they start statistically creating certain traits, instead of a single mutation. But oh no now we are back to descriptive taxonomy so let's just move on.

    The reality is that we haven't really observed speciation in a controlled setting, so the current framework almost requires us to sample the evolutionary timeline at long intervals, or it starts to get sloppy.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Depends on your definition of "chicken egg". Language is defined by the way people use it and nobody (other than perhaps a few people in this thread) has ever bothered defining what a chiclen egg is: Is it an egg laid by a chicken or is it an egg that contains a chicken

    When you go to the supermarket you call that a chicken egg because it was laid by a chicken, even if the egg is incapable of ever containing a chicken (at least from what I know you can't grow chickens from supermarket eggs) So arguably that means eggs laid by chickens are chicken eggs. But nobody has ever had to define whether an egg containing a chicken is also a chicken egg, even if the egg was not laid by a chicken. So if you don't define an egg laid by a proto-chicken to be a chicken egg then you would say that the chicken came before the egg.

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