On May 23, 2009, at 9:12 PM, [email protected] wrote:
In reply to Jones Beene's message of Fri, 22 May 2009 17:37:22
-0700 (PDT):
Hi,
[snip]
Which comes first - the chicken or the egg?
The egg came first. It was laid by a non-chicken who was so dumb
that it didn't
even realize that what came out of the egg was a different species,
and looked
after it anyway.
It has to be this way, because mutations occur in genes, which then
get
expressed as the creature grows.
Now I hope never to hear this silly conundrum ever again. ;)
I expect it will be around for generations.
You are simply dismissing the creationist view, which was a
previously stated part of the conundrum. Under that view chickens
and eggs could have been simultaneously created all over the place,
or just one or the other.
If you take the evolutionary view, the line between what is a chicken
and what is its immediate predecessor is probably indiscernible to
the eye. Evolution typically does not make huge leaps in a single
birth. It seems to me likely the parents of the first chicken(s)
were not much different in appearance from the chicken(s), so the
parents would not have to be very dumb to take care of the chicken
(s). The distinguishing characteristic is the inability to mate with
the parents, or at least with some of the animals the parents can
mate with, which can be due to a genetic characteristic that does not
manifest in a visible way. In any case I don't think speciation
occurs in a single birth, but rather as a gradual migration of
combined traits through a population. Speciation often occurs due to
the geographical separation of populations of a single species. If a
single birth occurred of an animal unable to mate with any others,
then that new species would have no future because it would need
others of its kind with which to mate. The dividing line between
chicken and not chicken would have to be very finely defined in order
to determine that a specific egg came from a non-chicken and produced
a chicken.
One thing seems to me to be sure, a chicken egg by definition only
comes from a chicken, so the chicken comes before the chicken egg.
Then there may be the not fully explored issue of meta DNA and the
ability of species to consciously or quickly modify DNA expressions
in response to environmental changes.
Werewolves and werechickens unite!
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
