Comment on Chicken vs Egg
PapaStevesy@midwest.social 1 month agoNo, if a chicken could hatch out of it, regardless of whether or not it actually did, it’s a chicken egg. Nothing else could hatch out of it and it didn’t somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn’t hatch.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.
Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a “Shicken”, if I hadn’t eaten it first. But, because there was never a “Shicken”, there could never be a “Shicken” egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.
AnonStoleMyPants@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
No, the shicken egg was a shicken egg even prior to you eating it. The act of giving it a name is irrelevant. The proto-chicken could’ve lain a hundred eggs, each becoming a new “chicken”. If 99 of them die off and are never born then that does not mean they didn’t exist. It just means they did not exist in a way where we could’ve given them a name.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 month ago
The distinction between “chicken” and “egg” is biologically irrelevant: they both refer to the same organism. The terms are descriptive, not prescriptive. The organism will progress the same way, regardless of what we decide to say about it.
The chicken/egg argument is purely one of semantics. “Giving it a name” isn’t just relevant to the discussion, it is the only factor relevant to the discussion.
The way you would have us describe the egg prevents us from accurately and consistently defining an egg. An egg laid by a chicken could mature into a new species, and by your arguments, should be described as an egg of that new species.
This creates a linguistic uncertainty in any case where the egg’s potential is not and cannot be known. Is there a Shicken egg among the dozen you bought? A Blargleblat egg? Do you have the eggs of a dozen new evolutions with a common chicken ancestor? You cannot say with certainty.
However, if we describe the egg as the product of the creature that laid it, we have no such uncertainty. If we describe it as the possession of the offspring within it, we have no such uncertainty. The uncertainty only arises when we try to define it by an unknowable condition that may or may not occur.
AnonStoleMyPants@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
But that same argument works the other way too, no? If you define a chicken egg as an egg that came from a chicken, then if you have a dozen of eggs you cannot know whether they’re chicken eggs or whatever eggs unless you know specifically a chicken laid them. Even if you take a dna test of it and it comes back as “a chicken”, you cannot know whether it is in fact a chicken egg.
In the other definition you are capable of determining whether the egg is in fact a chicken egg by its contents.
PapaStevesy@midwest.social 1 month ago
OK, think of it like this instead. Obviously fuck accuracy, for ease we’ll call them cavepeople. Two different cavepeople that are genetically distinct from humans have sex, resulting in a genetically human fetus. That doesn’t change the cavempeople into humans, they’re still genetically different. It’s a caveperson’s fetus, but it’s a human fetus. Same thing with the egg. Genetically, the thing inside is a chicken and, genetically, the things that made the egg are not.