gwax's rumblings

Ok Internet, it’s time we had a lit­tle dis­cus­sion about the chicken and the egg. There’s a long­stand­ing pseudo-philosophical debate as to which came first: the chicken or the egg. The debate rests on two sim­ple prin­ci­ples: chick­ens come from chicken eggs and chicken eggs come from chick­ens. The whole debate is wildly cir­cu­lar and peo­ple like to make it anal­o­gous to other, (less pseudo-) philo­soph­i­cal debates.

Now, because this is a stu­pid argu­ment, I’m going to set the record straight. The egg came first. Now some peo­ple will launch into stu­pid debate with me and say where did the egg come from and to these peo­ple I say, learn some evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy. The cur­rent chicken gen­er­a­tion (gen­er­a­tion n) hatched from eggs laid by the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion (n-1). Generation n-1 hatched from eggs laid by gen­er­a­tion n-2 and this goes back for a long time. As you con­tinue to go back, dif­fer­ent vari­eties of chicken con­verge and we find, for exam­ple, that the Bandara chicken came orig­i­nally from an egg that was laid by a White Cornish or by a Gimmizah; in other words, the first Bandara egg was not laid by a Bandara chicken. Just as Bandaras can be traced back to eggs that are not their own, so too can chick­ens be traced back to an egg laid by some pre-chicken crea­ture. So there you have it, the egg came first, now shut up about the damned chicken or egg debate.

It will have to be noted that this solu­tion is the­o­ret­i­cal and that exper­i­men­tal tests sug­gest that the chicken came first. Having run only one trial, the results can not be guar­an­teed to be sta­tis­ti­cally significant.

As a side­note, the infor­ma­tion about the Bandara chicken came from a Breeds of Chicken site that google got me to.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 6:08 pm and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.