Which came first? Chicken or Eggs?

[TLB]

I like eggs.

[mesh control]

What the fuck is going on with all these threads?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

What the fuck is going on with all these threads?

He's trying (and failing) to be funny by posting a bunch of thinly disguised threads as an excuse to post egg pictures because it's Easter this weekend.

[CMoon]

Beyond the absurdity of the thread, it's more remarkable that this long standing 'unanswerable' question (even though eggs appear in the fossil record at least a couple hundred million years before the earliest bird) still remains as part of our cultural heritage somehow. Things that were culturally relevant 30 years ago our vanishing from our collective knowledge, but this little chesnut that was no doubt crap when it was first coined will be with our grandchildren.

These guys laid eggs, and they were around before the first bird...

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I blame creationists mostly for helping to perpetuate this so-called 'unanswerable question', along with everything else even remotely in the realm of science they've managed to fuck up.

[Ed Oscuro]

I gave the answer to this question some months ago, look it up

actually it was two answers

I blame creationists mostly for helping to perpetuate this so-called 'unanswerable question', along with everything else even remotely in the realm of science they've managed to fuck up.

I blame scientists and philosophers for parsing the question more and more rigorously.

[CMoon]

Ed, you should make a poll about whether you should blame scientists, philosophers or creationists more. Then post some pictures of eggs.

[Ed Oscuro]

is that an imperative or a merely relative should?

Also, I do not blame creationists; your command / request seems malformed in that respect.

[stryc9]

I blame creationists mostly for helping to perpetuate this so-called 'unanswerable question', along with everything else even remotely in the realm of science they've managed to fuck up.

No I'm pretty sure they say the chicken came first, after all it was created along with everything else.

[Ed Oscuro]

I blame creationists mostly for helping to perpetuate this so-called 'unanswerable question', along with everything else even remotely in the realm of science they've managed to fuck up.

No I'm pretty sure they say the chicken came first, after all it was created along with everything else.

"Everything" includes the egg.

[stryc9]

I blame creationists mostly for helping to perpetuate this so-called 'unanswerable question', along with everything else even remotely in the realm of science they've managed to fuck up.

No I'm pretty sure they say the chicken came first, after all it was created along with everything else.

"Everything" includes the egg.

'Everything else' as in the rest of the created beings.

Not the eggs that came from them, Ed.

[Ed Oscuro]

Then by definition that's not everything else. That's also not what I meant, obviously (hopefully).

But it's a good point still.

Here are a few scenarios for Creationists, taking into account what you said:

A Creationist's strict reading of the Bible merely states that God created the types of animals. From this you could infer that God simply created animals that could lay eggs, but that there were no eggs. However, there may be reasons not to think this is the case - like fossil evidence.

"Young Earth" proponents might think that eggs would have to be placed, ready to hatch into animals, along with animals nearby that are ready to act as parents (God plops them all in place, ready to rumble).
I think young-earthers are more likely to believe what you say, that the animal would come first, but this may cause trouble because of the evidence (or apparent evidence, as they might say) in the fossil record of eggs. Therefore, what I meant (that eggs and chickens both are plopped into place) seems more likely. (Obviously, none of this bodes well for young earth proponents, in terms of passing a sanity test.)

Young Earth proponents might find themselves accommodating the fossil record in an unusual way - not only might they say that God allows us to be misled (Descartes would not like this; many Christians call this heresy) by the fossil record into thinking that there was life before the recent creation of the Earth. After all, God is powerful enough, in all Christian dogmas, to be able to force systematic appearances that do not conform to reality ("the Pope's favorite argument," which appears in a work by Galileo because he was asked to put it there, so he had the idiot character say it at the end). The fossil record might reveal if there was an egg or chicken first, or maybe both at the same time, but this doesn't matter to the young earth creationist, because they realize that for this trick to work, the first animals probably would have needed some kind of similarity to the faked fossil record animals. So this would likely include there being eggs at the start of creation. The easy argument against this is that the fossil record is destroyed, including the record of the first "real" animals, so we might be able to find the truth, except for our own clumsiness.

A variation of this might work for people who believe in a fine-tuning argument for God's creating the universe. These folks tend to be arguing for a origin of the universe in line with observable evidence, and don't deny that evidence implies the universe is old, but they believe that it would have been improbable for life to arise in a single, self-caused universe without a God, so they say God fine-tuned the universe so that there would be life (...and that's a simplification in at least one respect), and would say almost to a person that once the conditions for life - i.e. the possibility from physics of there being life - were met, God stopped fine-tuning the universe; yet others may argue that God's fine-tuning of the universe would not stop until he created our life, and all our familiar animals, including chickens and eggs. As in the above situation, you can maybe get by starting with just chickens, or maybe you need eggs too.

In these arguments, at least, we see probabilistic evidence for the primacy of chickens over eggs (which happens to nicely dovetail with what most likely happened - eggs were structured developed by organisms after a long history of organisms).

If anybody is interested in what actual, non-creationist leaning scientists might have to say, I did post about it a few months ago, and it's maybe worth looking up.

[Dragoforce]

Egg topic = generic shoesama ban? I leave you kids alone for a year or so, and this happens?

[kernow]

I thought this was proven by scientists that it's chicken.


http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-6676542.html

[Ed Oscuro]

I thought this was proven by scientists that it's chicken.


http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-6676542.html

There was another news article, a year earlier (or later, I can't remember) stating that it's egg.

[undamned]

Haha, I like your writing, Ed I think many Christians see the young earth issue as a hill to die on because they think that it somehow shows God to be less powerful ("What? Are you saying God can't create everything in 6 literal days?!!"). Being as it's entirely possible that the 6 days of Genesis were not literal days and actually refer to periods, the argument of young vs old earth dissolves and we are left with the real issue: did God create the universe (via whatever means He saw fit) or are we the product of chance? And for the product of chance school, what claims do we make about the origins of matter/energy?

I'm far from an expert on these discussions, but I found it worth noting that the core issue is not how old the earth is.
-ud

[Randorama]

did God create the universe (via whatever means He saw fit) or are we the product of chance?

-ud

How about God created chance? Procedural Genesis as a new Synthesis of beliefs?

[Ed Oscuro]

I bet we can find gradations of procedural genesis, at least if we ask enough creationists. (Procedurally generated theistic interpretations?) Still, I'm betting most of them won't get there could be a difference between procedural genesis (I like that term, thanks) and a fine-tuning argument.

Something like procedural genesis, minus the God bit, was at the core of my critique of David Hume in comparison to Thomas Reid recently. It doesn't seem to rule out Hume's system of belief, after all.

[CMoon]

I thought this was proven by scientists that it's chicken.


http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-6676542.html

That's just reporters trying to sensationalize a science story. Love the editorial about some neanderthal find that revised our understanding of human evolution, 'New evidence shows evolution is wrong!' Still, my favorite news paper title came after a big snow storm: '13 INCHES!'

That's what she said.

[Ed Oscuro]

The best newspaper title (both humor and famousness) is probably "French push bottles up German rear," from WWI.