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.
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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posted by rick on March 18th, 2008 at 11:51PM
If a mutation occurs in the egg, then what comes out of the egg is inherently different from the parents that the egg came from.
Although, I'll concede that defining a boundary between when a non-chicken evolved to a chicken is problematic. I wish there was an intermediate value theorem for biology. :)
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