mf - story #895 - If you take a chicke

posted by dsk on March 18th, 2008 at 12:08PM

If you take a chicken and compare every one of it ancestors, you wouldn't be able to point to anyone of them as being sufficiently different from the previous one so as to call one something and call another something different.

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posted by dennisn on March 18th, 2008 at 1:16PM

The point is, though, that the difference exists (whether it's "sufficient" or not is immaterial in this context). The egg came first. I think the whole "issue" between the chicken v. egg is the "issue" between evolution and creation theory. Ugh.

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posted by dsk on March 18th, 2008 at 2:28PM

>The point is, though, that the difference exists (whether it's "sufficient" or not is immaterial in this context).

By your argument, I could claim that chickens in fact, do not exist. What we now know as chickens are actually unnamed flightless descendants of chickens of yesteryear.

>I think the whole "issue" between the chicken v. egg is the "issue" between evolution and creation theory.

Close. The question itself is framed for creationism. It is a caricature of evolution. There is no clear boundary in a lineage that you can point to and say "Ah ha - this is where chickens began".

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posted by rick on March 18th, 2008 at 7:42PM

So ... how do you explain what a chicken is? Or do you refute the existence of chickens?

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posted by dsk on March 18th, 2008 at 10:54PM

>So ... how do you explain what a chicken is? Or do you refute the existence of chickens?

No no no. Nothing silly like that.

What I'm saying is the "chicken-egg" problem is nonsensical. It is essentially a restatement of the http://en.wikipedia.org/w...adox_of_the_heap Sorites Paradox. The absolute worst way to resolve it is by pointing to a particular ancestor and saying "This is a chicken", because you will have an impossible task of trying to justify why the parents, even though they are virtually identical, are not chickens. And if they are chickens then surely their parents must be as well..and so on, until you hit dinosaurs (and then you know you screwed up somewhere) =).

This is the way creationists caricature evolution. Claiming for example, that if evolution is true, then at some point two apes must have given birth to a human.

I think the way to resolve it is to admit that our definition of what a 'chicken' just isn't good enough. It works well when we need to figure out which fowl is a chicken today, but its too ambiguous to adequately discern between the billions of the chicken's ancestors.

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-- by dsk on March 19th, 2008 at 1:31AM.

If a mutation occurs in the eg by rick on March 18th, 2008 at 11:51PM.

>If a mutation occurs in the e by dsk on March 19th, 2008 at 1:32AM.

Sure, at the molecular level - by dennisn on March 19th, 2008 at 9:08AM.

We don't have clear definition by Driusan on March 19th, 2008 at 6:34PM.

>We don't have clear definitio by dsk on March 19th, 2008 at 10:31PM.