Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Eggs predate chickens. Chicken eggs evolved simultaneously with chickens. There was no first chicken, nor first chicken egg.
Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Eggs predate chickens. Chicken eggs evolved simultaneously with chickens. There was no first chicken, nor first chicken egg.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s not how evolution works. The chicken egg did come before the chicken, because that’s where mutations occur.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
No, that is 100% not how evolution works. No individual has ever laid an egg of a different species. One mutation doesn’t make a non-chicken a chicken. Chickens evolved from their ancestors slowly over many many generations. It’s like how you can’t change one word and make a language a different language, but if you change enough words, it becomes a different language.
Let me put it another way. If you take a modern chicken back in time 10,000 years, it could probably breed with a chicken from then. But if you take it back maybe 20,000 years, maybe it can’t breed with a chicken from then. But if you take the chicken from 10kya, it could breed with the chicken from 20kya. So are they all the same species? Are they different species? Are they all chickens?
Humans like to put things in little boxes with clear delineations, but that’s not how nature works. Species don’t come to be from one mutation. They evolve as the accumulation of many many mutations over many many generations. There’s no point at which you can say that child is a different species than their parent.
RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m not saying some completely different bird laid an egg that contained a chicken. The change may be gradual, but the mutations still happen in the eggs. The first chicken or chickens were hatched, not transformed by radioactive goo.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
And what I’m telling you is that there was no first chicken, just like there was no first Spanish speaker. Species don’t evolve that way.
loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
But chicken are the same species as their wild counterpart, the red jungle fowl. And there’s such a diversity of them, some may be more closely related to a wild jungle fowl than to another variety of domestic chicken. Therefore, it seems to me that what defines a chicken (as opposed to a jungle fowl) isn’t a specific genetic mutation, but the fact that it’s domesticated. And it seems to me that capturing a live jungle fowl would’ve been easier than hatching an egg you’ve harvested. The fowl that first laid an egg in captivity may thus already be considered a chicken, although it was born a red jungle fowl, hatched from a red jungle fowl’s egg; and only then it laid the first chicken’s egg.