The egg may have hatched a chicken buy was it a 'chicken egg' ? Assuming of course that the question is which came first the chicken or the chicken egg. If you use the more generic egg with no requirement for it to be a chicken egg then one could safely state the egg came first. If on the other hand you define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken then the chicken must have come first. If a chicken egg is defined as an egg that hatches a chicken then the egg came first. Unless of course if through some divine method they both appeared at the same time.
-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gerhard Postpischil Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 3:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] Principles of Operation in pop American English? J R wrote: > After > all, unlike the chicken and the egg, we *do* know which came first. Perhaps you don't know, but some of us do. Propagated genetic changes occur in the germ plasm, allowing an organism to produce differing offspring. At some point there was a bird that lacked a quality we consider vital to "chicken-ness", but which appeared in the egg, which was therefore first. Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, VT new e-mail address: gerhardp (at) charter (dot) net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
