Gerhard's generic point is well made, but the chicken-egg situation is in fact very complicated. One of the most widely quoted apothegms most widely quoted among modern evolutionary biologists is Peter Dawkins' (or perhaps Samuel Buitler's)
A chicken is only an egg's way of making more eggs It has been quoted with approval by Jacques Monod and Sir Peter Medawar. There are, I think, two usefully separated issues here. The first is that of how a specific avian species arises out of the reproductive activity of different predecessor species (Darwin's preoccupation in 'The origin of species'). The second is the more metaphysical one: Why chickens? There are many variants of this second question. The proteins, which on one view a virus manufactures to provide itself of descendents, can instead be put first: a virus can be viewed as the mechanism these proteins use to provide themselves with offspring. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
