I think the egg came first because in order for the chicken to even exist and evolve to its current state, it would need to be first hatch only BY THEN it becomes the famous clucking bird we know and love.

Checkmate chicken-ists your move?

    • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      No, that is 100% not how evolution works. No individual has ever laid an egg of a different species. One mutation doesn’t make a non-chicken a chicken. Chickens evolved from their ancestors slowly over many many generations. It’s like how you can’t change one word and make a language a different language, but if you change enough words, it becomes a different language.

      Let me put it another way. If you take a modern chicken back in time 50,000 years, it could probably breed with a chicken from then. But if you take it back maybe 100,000 years, maybe it can’t breed with a chicken from then. But if you take the chicken from 50kya, it could breed with the chicken from 100kya. So are they all the same species? Are they different species? Are they all chickens?

      Humans like to put things in little boxes with clear delineations, but that’s not how nature works. Species don’t come to be from one mutation. They evolve as the accumulation of many many mutations over many many generations. There’s no point at which you can say that child is a different species than their parent.

      • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
        0·
        21 days ago

        I’m not saying some completely different bird laid an egg that contained a chicken. The change may be gradual, but the mutations still happen in the eggs. The first chicken or chickens were hatched, not transformed by radioactive goo.

        • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          21 days ago

          And what I’m telling you is that there was no first chicken, just like there was no first Spanish speaker. Species don’t evolve that way.

            • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
              0·
              21 days ago

              Just because it’s a saying doesn’t mean it’s true for everything. Every child is the same species as its parent.

              • guy@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                21 days ago

                Sure, and since that means that there can be no new species unless they magically appear, there is only one species on this planet. Just very… varying

                • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
                  0·
                  21 days ago

                  Ok, let me put it another way. Green and red are clearly different colors, right? But if you make a gradient where the green smoothly transitions to the red, there isn’t one single point where it changes from “green” to “red”. This doesn’t mean that the two colors on the ends aren’t completely different colors, it means that when you look at every pixel, they’re almost exactly the same color as the pixel next to them.

                  Different species exist. Speciation is a thing. I’m not claiming otherwise. But creatures don’t birth a species other than their own. It takes many many many generations over eons of time for a population to speciate. Speciation is something that happens to populations, not individuals.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation