Comment on Chicken vs Egg

• PapaStevesy@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  It’s an egg that will hatch into a chicken, since the “first” chicken must have hatched out of an egg that was laid and fertilized by two “non-chickens” whose DNA combined together to make a full-blown chicken. Of course it wasn’t actually just one egg, but really, no matter how you think about it, the egg came first.

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  • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Can mutations that occurred during life be transmitted to offspring? Biology classes were a long time ago.

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    • Seleni@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      That depends on what you mean.

      Did a giraffe stretch its neck longer and longer, and then pass that long-necked gene onto its kids? No.

      Can an embryo that gets a random mutation while developing in the egg/womb pass it on to their children? Yes.

      This gets a bit more complicated if you really dig into it, though. Environment does change the expression of genes, and that particular sequence of genes that have been activated/shut-off/whatever can be passed on to children too.

      Hence why children who were born to two shorter parents will often grow much taller than them if given much better nutrition. Or why obesity often shows up chronically in families that were poor or had limited access to healthier foods in other ways; their bodies had adapted to grab and store every extra calorie they could to guard against starvation, and unfortunately shutting that gene expression off naturally takes multiple generations.

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      • frunch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        This was a fascinating comment to read, thanks for posting 🙂

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    • PapaStevesy@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Yes, that’s the driving force of evolution.

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  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I agree, and I’ve made the same argument. It’s perfectly valid, Unless the egg belongs to the creature who laid it, instead of the creature that hatched from it.

    If the egg in question is a “proto-chicken’s egg” because it was laid by a proto-chicken, then the chicken would have come before the chicken egg.

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    • PapaStevesy@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      No it wouldn’t. If we’re going to talk about the creation of chickens as happening at a single instance of egg-laying, the two progenitors of said first chicken would be proto-chickens whose DNA combined in the fertilized egg to make, for the first time ever, a chicken. Yes, it’s a chicken egg, because it contains a chicken, but it’s also a proto-chicken’s egg because it wasn’t laid by a full chicken. It couldn’t have been, they didn’t exist yet.

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      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.

        By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.

        Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn’t be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.

        The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.

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    • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Feel like any kind of mutation that turns the pre chicken into the proto chicken happens at birth, if the pre chicken had a mutated offspring, I’d wager the egg is mutated significantly from what a normal pre chicken egg would be, since after all it has to support a proto chicken, not a pre chicken.

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• BassTurd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The former, otherwise it would be “chicken’s egg”.

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  • PapaStevesy@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Incorrect, a “chicken’s egg” would be an egg in the possession of a chicken, which would be the egg a chicken lays. The “first chicken” did not hatch out of an egg laid by a chicken because they didn’t exist.

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    • BassTurd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      You’re right. I just realized that I typed the opposite of what I meant. And then in another comment said what you did thinking I was defending my og opinion. I’m all over the place this morning.

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  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Amy is a chicken. Amy lays an egg. Brenda is a chicken. Brenda hatched from the egg Amy laid. The egg in question is clearly a chicken’s egg, but is it Amy’s egg, or Brenda’s egg?

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    • BassTurd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It was Amy’s egg that Brenda inherited, so now it’s Brenda’s egg. So the OG egg was Amy’s.

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      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        So, it doesn’t become a Chicken’s egg until Brenda has come into existence. Brenda being the chicken.

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• candybrie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I think it’s an egg laid by a chicken. Unfertilized eggs laid by chickens that will never become chickens are still chicken eggs.

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  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    That’s about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken’s egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn’t become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.

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  • PapaStevesy@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    We’re not talking about eggs laid by chickens, we’re talking about eggs laid by the things that weren’t quite chickens, but the eggs of which contain chickens, due to a novel DNA combination.

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    • candybrie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      The question posed is what is a chicken egg? Is it an egg from which a chicken hatches or an egg which a chicken lays. I’d argue it’s the latter. Because we already consider eggs from which no chicken could hatch but that a chicken laid, chicken eggs.

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• Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I feel like my comment in another thread is even more relevant here:

  I have no direct knowledge about that, but if we take the analogy of the egg (shell, albumen and yolk sack) being the life-support system of the embryo during gestation, in humans the placenta would be a big part of that, and exactly whose body it is part of its not simple (from what I remember both mother and child contribute cells, and the ‘plan’ for building it comes from the father’s genes). So maybe for chickens it could be ambiguous whether the shell ‘belongs’ to the laying generation or the hatching one. Seems like mostly a human taxonomy distinction to make anyway, obviously it’s in between the two, but we like to draw the line somewhere.

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