this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Is a "chicken egg" an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that will hatch into a chicken?
It's an egg that will hatch into a chicken, since the "first" chicken must have hatched out of an egg that was laid and fertilized by two "non-chickens" whose DNA combined together to make a full-blown chicken. Of course it wasn't actually just one egg, but really, no matter how you think about it, the egg came first.
Can mutations that occurred during life be transmitted to offspring? Biology classes were a long time ago.
That depends on what you mean.
Did a giraffe stretch its neck longer and longer, and then pass that long-necked gene onto its kids? No.
Can an embryo that gets a random mutation while developing in the egg/womb pass it on to their children? Yes.
This gets a bit more complicated if you really dig into it, though. Environment does change the expression of genes, and that particular sequence of genes that have been activated/shut-off/whatever can be passed on to children too.
Hence why children who were born to two shorter parents will often grow much taller than them if given much better nutrition. Or why obesity often shows up chronically in families that were poor or had limited access to healthier foods in other ways; their bodies had adapted to grab and store every extra calorie they could to guard against starvation, and unfortunately shutting that gene expression off naturally takes multiple generations.
This was a fascinating comment to read, thanks for posting 🙂
Yes, that's the driving force of evolution.
I agree, and I've made the same argument. It's perfectly valid, Unless the egg belongs to the creature who laid it, instead of the creature that hatched from it.
If the egg in question is a "proto-chicken's egg" because it was laid by a proto-chicken, then the chicken would have come before the chicken egg.
No it wouldn't. If we're going to talk about the creation of chickens as happening at a single instance of egg-laying, the two progenitors of said first chicken would be proto-chickens whose DNA combined in the fertilized egg to make, for the first time ever, a chicken. Yes, it's a chicken egg, because it contains a chicken, but it's also a proto-chicken's egg because it wasn't laid by a full chicken. It couldn't have been, they didn't exist yet.
There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.
By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.
Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn't be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.
The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.
I can’t believe I’m actually reading this thread.
Discourse as old as time, song as old as rhyme, chicken or the egg.
No, if a chicken could hatch out of it, regardless of whether or not it actually did, it's a chicken egg. Nothing else could hatch out of it and it didn't somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn't hatch.
Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.
Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a "Shicken", if I hadn't eaten it first. But, because there was never a "Shicken", there could never be a "Shicken" egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.
No, the shicken egg was a shicken egg even prior to you eating it. The act of giving it a name is irrelevant. The proto-chicken could've lain a hundred eggs, each becoming a new "chicken". If 99 of them die off and are never born then that does not mean they didn't exist. It just means they did not exist in a way where we could've given them a name.
The distinction between "chicken" and "egg" is biologically irrelevant: they both refer to the same organism. The terms are descriptive, not prescriptive. The organism will progress the same way, regardless of what we decide to say about it.
The chicken/egg argument is purely one of semantics. "Giving it a name" isn't just relevant to the discussion, it is the only factor relevant to the discussion.
The way you would have us describe the egg prevents us from accurately and consistently defining an egg. An egg laid by a chicken could mature into a new species, and by your arguments, should be described as an egg of that new species.
This creates a linguistic uncertainty in any case where the egg's potential is not and cannot be known. Is there a Shicken egg among the dozen you bought? A Blargleblat egg? Do you have the eggs of a dozen new evolutions with a common chicken ancestor? You cannot say with certainty.
However, if we describe the egg as the product of the creature that laid it, we have no such uncertainty. If we describe it as the possession of the offspring within it, we have no such uncertainty. The uncertainty only arises when we try to define it by an unknowable condition that may or may not occur.
But that same argument works the other way too, no? If you define a chicken egg as an egg that came from a chicken, then if you have a dozen of eggs you cannot know whether they're chicken eggs or whatever eggs unless you know specifically a chicken laid them. Even if you take a dna test of it and it comes back as "a chicken", you cannot know whether it is in fact a chicken egg.
In the other definition you are capable of determining whether the egg is in fact a chicken egg by its contents.
Correct, but that is information that can be known, whether it is actually known or not. When you eat a bird egg, you can know what bird it came from. You cannot know what bird it would have become, specifically because you prevented it from ever becoming that bird.
You could speculate that it could have become a new species, based on the genetics within the egg. But, even if you didn't eat it, it could have failed to mature for any number of reasons. It might have become a new species of bird; it might have become a rotten egg.
The aphorism "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched" specifically warns us against considering the future possibilities of the egg.
I just don't get why you're so hung up on the potentiality of an unhatched egg when that has nothing to do with the scenario. The egg in the scenario hatches and it has a chicken in it. That's the whole point of the scenario.
The potential of an unhatched egg means that the egg can't be accurately described as belonging to the offspring, until the offspring actually exists.
The proto-chicken egg does become a chicken egg, but not until a chicken exists. While the egg that will eventually become a chicken egg does exist before the chicken, it is not a chicken egg until the chicken exists. Until there is a chicken, it is just the egg of a proto-chicken.
We are discussing which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg. The answer cannot be the egg. The answer can be "neither". The answer can the "the chicken", if by "before", we mean that the status of the egg is dependent on the existence of the chicken.
Exactly, it doesn't belong to the offspring, that's why I said it is a proto-chicken's egg. It belongs to the ones that made it and raised it. But we know the contents because it's a preset hypothetical in which the egg hatches and it has a chicken in it. So it's a chicken egg that belongs to proto-chickens.
OK, think of it like this instead. Obviously fuck accuracy, for ease we'll call them cavepeople. Two different cavepeople that are genetically distinct from humans have sex, resulting in a genetically human fetus. That doesn't suddenly change the cavepeople into humans, they're still genetically different. It's a caveperson's fetus, but it's a human fetus. Same thing with the egg. Genetically, the thing inside is a chicken and, genetically, the things that made the egg are not.
not to dig this hole any deeper, but the defining characteristics of a chicken aren't like, easily identifiable. we can build a hypothetical in which two proto-chickens are genetically capable of producing offspring that is "chicken", but that's kinda rube-goldbergesque, there must have been some extremely specific series of genetic coincidences required to produce something chicken enough to be a "chicken" in that scenario. genetics, and evolution more generally, tends to be more complex. the specific genetic markers that distinguish chicken from non-chicken, if we say they exist, are probably not in and of themselves what makes a chicken, because single gene changes don't usually make creatures incapable of interbreeding with their parents' species, and that's a defining feature of the taxonomic category "chicken" belongs in.
like, if we grant that the chicken came from a proto-chicken egg, because the chicken has a special chicken gene, its really really likely that the next generation of "chickens" came from our progenitor chicken mating with a proto-chicken. taxonomically, that means that proto-chickens are chickens, because species is commonly defined by the ability to produce fertile offspring (eggs). so for every step in the process towards chicken-ness, we can't really say that the egg came first in a taxonomical sense, because the first member of the species of "chicken" (as defined by whatever genetic marker we claim indicates chicken-ness) was almost certainly able to reproduce with things that didn't have that genetic marker!
maybe there's some other sense in which the chicken and the egg can be discretely separated, but if we are talking about species, taxonomically, anything that can lay eggs to make fertile chickens must be a chicken by definition, barring some really weird edge cases that probably didn't happen.
fun fact: plants can do the weird edge case, and do it quite often. plants can duplicate their chromosomes without catastrophic consequences, unlike animals, and they can reproduce without sex with another individual, so a plant can produce offspring that aren't fertile with their parent species, and can reproduce independently (called polyploidy). so a seed can come before the grass (as with some kinds of wheat, and many other plants). this can also happen in reverse, where a polyploidal offspring can start reproducing with a species it couldn't before!
Yeah, we were necessarily ignoring the obvious evolutionary issues inherent in the chicken-and-egg scenario, since it very clearly was not one egg-laying instance that created a new species. I know I made reference to as much somewhere in the thread, it seemed like a waste of time to restate it every comment. I'm fairly certain we were on the same page about that. Cool wall though!
whoops! i was pretty high when i wrote that. guess i just felt like sharing.
Feel like any kind of mutation that turns the pre chicken into the proto chicken happens at birth, if the pre chicken had a mutated offspring, I'd wager the egg is mutated significantly from what a normal pre chicken egg would be, since after all it has to support a proto chicken, not a pre chicken.
The former, otherwise it would be "chicken's egg".
Incorrect, a "chicken's egg" would be an egg in the possession of a chicken, which would be the egg a chicken lays. The "first chicken" did not hatch out of an egg laid by a chicken because they didn't exist.
You're right. I just realized that I typed the opposite of what I meant. And then in another comment said what you did thinking I was defending my og opinion. I'm all over the place this morning.
Amy is a chicken. Amy lays an egg. Brenda is a chicken. Brenda hatched from the egg Amy laid. The egg in question is clearly a chicken's egg, but is it Amy's egg, or Brenda's egg?
It was Amy's egg that Brenda inherited, so now it's Brenda's egg. So the OG egg was Amy's.
So, it doesn't become a Chicken's egg until Brenda has come into existence. Brenda being the chicken. The chicken has to exist for the egg to become a Chicken's egg.
The first chicken egg is the egg that Brenda hatched from, but it didn't become a chicken egg until Brenda was a chicken and not just a (proto-chicken) egg.
Right and wrong. It was a chicken's egg when Amy laid it, but it was a chicken egg when Brenda was hatched. So yes, the chicken has to exist for the first chicken's egg, but the first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, that was not a chicken's egg.
To clarify, I'm assuming that in this case Amy was the first evolution of the chicken, therefore she laid the first chicken's egg that was the second chicken egg, bevause her parents weren't chickens, so what was laid wasn't a chicken's egg until Amy hatched. Schrodinger's egg if you will.
Amy is a proto-chicken. Her offspring, Brenda, is the first creature containing the mutation that distinguishes chickens from proto-chickens. Brenda is the first chicken.
Amy's egg couldn't be a chicken egg because there was no such thing as a chicken when she laid it. There would be no such thing as a chicken until Brenda existed, at which time the egg that would become Brenda also became a chicken egg.
The chicken egg could not have come first. The first chicken egg was laid by something that was not quite a chicken, but it didn't become a chicken egg until it had developed into a chicken.
You established right away in your first post that Amy is a chicken. That means she came from a chicken egg, but it wasn't a chicken's egg until Amy was a chicken. Until the hatch it was her parent's egg, whatever species they may have been.
I think we're saying the same thing, but in my version, Amy was the first chicken hatched from non chicken parents, and laid the first chicken's egg, birthing Brenda.
In the end, chicken came first, which in turn made the egg, a chicken egg, and coincidentally that chicken's egg.
My bad, I was making a different point with that analogy, and I had moved on some time ago. The app I'm using makes it difficult to read back up the thread.
I think we are making similar arguments. I would say that the egg Amy hatched from is the first "chicken's egg", but it is only the first chicken's egg because it belongs to Amy, and it did not exist until chicken-Amy existed, which was some time well after the egg was laid.
Sorry, I'm getting distracted with real life right now.
What could possibly be more important than this?
I feel like my comment in another thread is even more relevant here:
I have no direct knowledge about that, but if we take the analogy of the egg (shell, albumen and yolk sack) being the life-support system of the embryo during gestation, in humans the placenta would be a big part of that, and exactly whose body it is part of its not simple (from what I remember both mother and child contribute cells, and the 'plan' for building it comes from the father's genes). So maybe for chickens it could be ambiguous whether the shell 'belongs' to the laying generation or the hatching one. Seems like mostly a human taxonomy distinction to make anyway, obviously it's in between the two, but we like to draw the line somewhere.
I think it's an egg laid by a chicken. Unfertilized eggs laid by chickens that will never become chickens are still chicken eggs.
That's about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken's egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn't become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.
We're not talking about eggs laid by chickens, we're talking about eggs laid by the things that weren't quite chickens, but the eggs of which contain chickens, due to a novel DNA combination.
The question posed is what is a chicken egg? Is it an egg from which a chicken hatches or an egg which a chicken lays? I'd argue it's the latter. Because we already consider eggs from which no chicken could hatch but that a chicken laid, chicken eggs.