mf - story #911 - If a mutation occurs

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. :)

Link | Parent

posted by dsk on March 19th, 2008 at 1:32AM

>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.

Yeah, but that happens all the time. You aren't a perfect copy of your parents. Most likely you have a number of mutations.

Link

posted by dennisn on March 19th, 2008 at 9:08AM

Sure, at the molecular level -- but practically, we have very few and rigid criteria for defining chickens (they have feathers, white shells, etc, etc) -- the scientific classification into kingdoms phylums etc -- the chicken being "gallus domesticus".

Link

posted by Driusan on March 19th, 2008 at 6:34PM

We don't have clear definitions for classifying chickens. You can always pluck the feathers off a chicken. It would still be a chicken. You can defeather, behead, and cook a chicken so that it looks nothing like what an average chicken looks like. It'll still be "a chicken."

Even if that wasn't the case and we did have rigid criteria of what is and isn't a chicken, the definition is being retroactively applied. You're starting from what you (or whoever is defining it) arbitrarily want to classify as "a chicken" and coming up with a definition that suits your whims. You can come up with the most rigorous definition of "chicken" that you want and it will still tell you more about the person who came up with the definition then it will tell you about chickens.

Link

posted by dsk on March 19th, 2008 at 10:31PM

>We don't have clear definitions for classifying chickens.

I think Taxonomy would disagree.

Link