Was that a chicken egg, though? It had a chicken in it, but it wasn't laid by a chicken. If a chicken somehow laid a hollow egg, you'd say you have a hollow chicken egg even though there was never a chicken in it. So what makes an egg a chicken egg, that it has a chicken in it or that it was laid by a chicken?
Goddamnit, chicken doesn't look like a real word anymore. Semantic satiation is a bitch.
It wasn't a hard cutoff from what it was before to the chicken it evolved into. It just kept evolving and one day it came out with all the traits we associated with a chicken.
Of course, we know now that the question requires we make an arbitrary distinction between 'chicken' and 'almost-chicken'. I'm saying I don't think just that distinction is enough to answer the question. Even if we could draw a line in the sand and find the first thing that fits all our arbitrary definitions of a chicken, what criteria does an egg have to satisfy to be a chicken egg?
There's no requirement in the saying that it has to be a "chicken egg". You are just adding an unnecessary qualifier. Of course the assumption is that the egg was laid by something that's not a chicken, otherwise we're back to square one.
Chicken egg is the implication though. If it's just chicken or the egg you can look at dinosaur eggs and say "obviously it's the egg because it existed millions of years before chickens"
Yes that is exactly the point. The “paradox” stems from before our understanding of evolution, evolution provides a simple answer to a literally millenia old question (Plutarch asked it in the 1st century).
No, because the question's language was specific to chickens. Since chickens lay eggs, and since chicken hatch from chicken eggs, how can you determine which came first?
It's not an argument of semantics, it's a question of infinite regression. You have to stop being so literal about the language and understand that the chicken and the egg are stand-ins for literally all situations where it's not clear which variable is the cause and which is the effect. It's a broader philosophical question that extends well beyond chicken or eggs.
No it’s not. The question is literally “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” Not “the chicken or the chicken egg?” You’ve made it a semantic argument by semantically demanding an infinite regression, the question as originally posed is answerable by our learning how life has developed.
Plutarch was a philosopher. This is a philosophical question. This was back when people still believed in spontaneous generation, there was no concept of evolution.
Is it? Did the word that Plutarch use specifically mean eggs in general or was it specific to chickens? Or do you not know because you did not read Plutarch's work in the original language? I'm assuming you're fluent in the correct dialect of ancient greek if you're going to make clear arguments about the exact language used like that.
That's why I said "not that it matters." I was just pointing out that, even if we do accept your interpretation (which, as I said, I don't), it still doesn't matter.
Okay, well I'm saying that you're all completely misunderstanding a philosophical question that can even be asked about evolution and the arbitrary nature of separating species of animals when no such natural separation actually applies
But chickens are dinosaurs. The "chicken" is just a word we invented to easily identify several species of similar dinosaurs native to southern Asia. It has nothing to do with the reality of genetics and evolution.
This whole thread is just people arguing over the "paradox of the heap"
You are kind of arguing the same thing because if chicken is a word we invented to identify several species of similar dinosaurs native to southern Asia then that doesn't mean that there weren't other dinosaur species who existed millions of years before chickens did.
Everyone in this thread is just arguing semantics when they don't even understand the question in its original language
The question is more than two millenia old, Aristotle wrote about it. The people that asked didn't know that chickens ever didn't exist, they just knew that chickens hatch from eggs and chicken eggs were laid by chickens. The question therefore was, because all chickens must hatch from eggs, and all chicken eggs must be laid by a chicken, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
It should go without saying that the question isn't simply, did the first chicken hatch from an egg? It's, which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg? Even you implicitly understood that because you referred to the first chicken rather than the first multicellular, sexually reproducing life.
The question relies on whether a chicken egg shell is made from Parent Chicken DNA or baby chicken DNA.
If chicken reproduction is similar to humans, and they're born with their eggs already, then the egg would have mother's DNA, and so the chicken would come first, because the eggshell contained almost-chicken DNA, but inside the egg was chicken DNA.
If the egg shell contains baby DNA then the egg came first, because the egg that came from an almost-chicken has chicken-DNA.
For me, I think the name of the egg is the point of origin. If it came naturally came from that animal, Then it's that animal's egg. Does not matter what's inside it. Almost-chicken laid an egg. It's an "almost-chicken egg" then what we would consider a "chicken" hatches. When it grows up and lays an egg then that will be called a "chicken egg"
It was a chicken egg. The confusion is purely semantics because an observer wouldnt know the egg was mutated. Dont give the imaginary observer a platform.
Thank you, arbiter of what-a-chicken-egg-is. It's semantics only insofar as we have to actually define the question. If we have to ask 'what is a chicken', we have to also ask, 'what is a chicken egg'?
I don't know that I agree that a chicken egg is an egg with a chicken in it rather than an egg laid by a chicken. As I said, a hollow chicken egg is still a chicken egg. A turkey egg with a chicken put into it is still a turkey egg. I'm open to arguments, though.
The being inside the egg and what it hatches into are in fact the same persistent being. The DNA in the egg would not match the thing that laid it in this case.
A hollow egg is a chicken’s egg but it is not a chicken. Every chicken has been an egg but not all eggs become chickens
Your claim that a turkey lays an egg and you put a chicken in it and its still a turkey egg? Thats gibberish argumentative nonsense that you made up. Your argument is essentially “well i could have wrong opinions so you have to keep those in mind” no i dont
Your claim that a turkey lays an egg and you put a chicken in it and its still a turkey egg?
Well if chicken reproduction is similar to humans, and they're born with their eggs already, then the egg would have Turkey DNA, and so the egg would always remain a Turkey egg regardless of its insides.
The being inside the egg and what it hatches into are in fact the same persistent being. The DNA in the egg would not match the thing that laid it in this case.
Correct, the DNA in the egg wouldn't match. What is a chicken egg, though?
A hollow egg is a chicken’s egg but it is not a chicken. Every chicken has been an egg but not all eggs become chickens
I agree that every chicken comes from an egg. I do not agree that every chicken comes from a chicken egg, because I do not necessarily agree that a chicken egg is simply an egg that contains a chicken.
Your claim that a turkey lays an egg and you put a chicken in it and its still a turkey egg?
Yes. That's how cloning works. You implant an embryo in a surrogate, even between species. That doesn't turn the turkey egg into a chicken egg, it's a turkey egg with a chicken embryo in it. Go one step further - imagine it worked with emus. Nobody would agree that an egg an emu laid is a chicken egg, same as one laid in your coop.
I follow what you're saying but I'd argue against it. If the egg was defined by having been laid by a chicken, then that precludes any possibility of the egg coming first. Even if God himself placed the first chicken egg on the Earth, that definition would still not allow for the answer to be "the egg" because a chicken did not lay it.
Therefore, for the sake of argument, the egg must be defined by it's property of hatching into a chicken, rather than having been birthed by one. That said, the whole evolution argument sidesteps the entire philosophical debate so I think it kind of defeats the purpose.
The opposite is also true, though. If we draw a line and define the first chicken, it must have hatched an egg, there's no way around that. But if we then say it must have hatched from a chicken egg, it precludes any possibility of the chicken having come first. A chicken created by a god and placed onto Earth wouldn't qualify as a chicken by that definition - so all you're asking is, 'did the first chicken hatch from an egg?'
So which came first, the chicken or the egg? What is a chicken, and what is a chicken egg? Must a chicken hatch from a chicken egg, or can a chicken hatch from something else? We know it can, put a chicken in a turkey egg and it hatches a chicken, but can a chicken egg be laid by anything but a chicken?
If we say it must have hatched from a chicken egg, it precludes any possibility of the chicken having come first
This is true and therefore, for the sake of argument, the question implies that this is also not the case.
We can thus define the egg as hatching into a chicken, and define the chicken as simply being a chicken regardless of it's origins. Essentially it does boil down to "did the first chicken come from an egg" but that still addresses the same philosophical debate albeit phrased less elegantly.
Why, then, should we not define the first chicken egg as having been laid by a chicken and still define the first chicken independent of what it hatched from? That's just as good as the opposite, and we know chicken eggs don't have to hatch into chickens.
By defining the first chicken egg in relation to what it hatched into or was laid by, you're begging the question. There must have been a first chicken, and we agree that we can not define it as having come from a chicken egg. There must also have been a first chicken egg, but you're trying to define that by saying it hatches into a chicken. If that were true, we can then define the first chicken as having hatched from a chicken egg - but we agree we can't do that without begging the question, being tautological. So the chicken egg must be defined in a way that does not rely on what it hatches into or was laid by.
You pose a good question, and I'm technically supposed to be working right now so I don't have the time to really think about the intricacies of your argument, but I think if we look at the definitions from another lens then they will make more sense in the context of the philosophical question rather selecting seemingly arbitrary distinctions which seems to be the confusion.
The question speaks to the origin of an infinite cycle which lacks an obvious starting point. Essentially, A gives rise to B and B gives rise to A in perpetuity.
We can not define B as coming from A while A still gives rise to B, or vice versa because that turns the cycle into a straightforward line from A to B.
Therefore, we must define the chicken and the egg irrespective to their origins, but instead by their product. The egg can not be defined as coming from a chicken and the chicken can not be defined as coming from an egg.
The egg must however be defined as producing the chicken in order to continue the cycle, rather than just being any random egg for any animal in general. I suppose we should also specify that this is a fertile chicken capable of laying viable eggs in order to continue the cycle from that point too.
Alternatively we could also define it in the reverse direction where the egg must be laid by a chicken and the chicken must be hatched from an egg as long as we're consistent with the direction of the cycle, but then the question doesn't really make sense when asking about the origin. By these definitions a more appropriate question would be "what comes last" rather than "what came first". I'm not really sure if that makes sense actually, but intuitively I wouldn't go by these definitions.
I understand what you're getting at, but I still take issue.
We don't know that a chicken egg must produce a chicken, and in fact we know that it doesn't have to. We know that they can, and we know that eggs of other animals can hatch into chickens, but we don't know what the first chicken egg was. If we're to define them by their products, then we can say the first chicken laid a chicken egg, but that egg wasn't necessarily the first and didn't necessarily hatch into a chicken anyway, which means we've broken our definition of chicken egg regardless.
If we want a definite answer to an apparent paradox that isn't tautological, we have to use different criteria. To the best of our knowledge there are no infinite chains of causality - we have answered the question as the Greeks understood it, there is a beginning to all things. Infinite regresses can't be satisfied by our current understanding or possibly at all because everything that currently exists, if you look back far enough, has a common start from which all causation seems to have flowed, although causality breaking down makes it basically impossible to say if it actually was. But if the question can be answered, it has to be answered in a way that resolves the infinite regression without simply asserting that one came first. We can not define one by the other.
Anyway, go ahead and work, this is as good as navel gazing anyway, lol.
If we're to define them by their products, then we can say the first chicken laid a chicken egg, but that egg wasn't necessarily the first and didn't necessarily hatch into a chicken anyway, which means we've broken our definition of chicken egg regardless.
Well it's not a cycle of first chickens and first eggs, but just a cycle of chickens and eggs until you point to a starting point. Practically speaking, the first chicken did lay the first viable chicken egg which then did continue a perpetual chain of chickens and eggs which continues to this day. If, back to the philosophical question, the first chicken laid five eggs but only one of them produced a chicken, then that's the egg were concerned with in terms of the cycle.
It is meant to be tautological which is why Aristotle said there is no answer when he posed the question, and in an abstract ...A>B>A>B>... sense, there logically can not be an answer. Now you could either look at it that way as an unanswerable thought exercise, like I tend to, or you could look at it as an answerable problem with the aim of the answer shedding light on other seemingly infinite regressions. I mean, all things considered, nobody really cares about the origins of chickens and eggs, but if the answer could help to explain similar, yet more meaningful situations, then the question may be worth considering. I don't really think we have many such situations for the answer to be worthwhile but judging by the wiki page, apparently Plutarch would disagree.
The caveat is that the question was not posed with As and Bs but with chickens and eggs as a physical proxy for the theoretical, so if there was to be an answer it would lie in those physical constraints with the hopes that the implications of that answer in a physical context may shed light on other physical manifestations of the problem. The evolution answer applies to the chicken and the egg but in my opinion doesn't really satisfy the overall problem because you can point to an origin of all life and avoid any real sense of perpetuity.
But maybe that's the implication of the answer and I'm just being obtuse about it ¯\(ツ)/¯
My understanding was that is was originally a genuine question of reality, although not necessarily and specifically trying to answer for chickens and their eggs, asked with the aim of resolving such a regression. You're right that Aristotle asserted that it couldn't be done - and strictly within the confines of the question as asked he is correct.
Looking from a broader context, though, I would argue that the question was meant more as an ask of whether there is a start to a seemingly infinite regression, and if there then what? Is there a start and can we know it? That's how Plutarch seems to have understood it, at least.
If that's the case, Aristotle had it wrong and modern science has given us an answer for the first half - there can be, seemingly must be, a start to every seemingly infinite regression. A cause to everything that exists, even a seemingly infinite regress. The infinite regress as a concept looks to only exist for a lack of information or as an artifact of how we use and understand language and logic. A more definitive answer would be nice, but what we have is enough to satisfy me and turn the question in my mind to the second half, can we know what the first cause is? I think that starts with establishing what the start looks like without tautology. Easier said than done, of course, even in examples as seemingly simple as the chicken or the egg, to say nothing of trying to find the first cause of everything.
For the record, I don't think you're being obtuse, I think we just have different ideas of what the question means to ask.
yes but is the first chicken egg the egg that came out of the not chicken but hatched the chicken, or is it the first egg that the first chicken layed?
I'VE BEEN SAYING THIS SINCE I WAS A LITTLE KID!!!! Like DUH obviously the egg came first because there were many egg laying creatures before chickens that chickens eventually evolved from!! This has literally pissed me off so much since I was like 4 I don't know why but it just seems SO obvious to me and yet almost everyone sees it as like an unanswerable question. Ugh
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u/DarkChocolatRaisinet Jul 21 '21
Which is exactly why there is an answer to the "which came first?" question, and it's: egg.
The egg came before the chicken, because the first chicken to have evolved from whatever came before it didn't just appear out of nowhere.