{"id":11847,"date":"2010-06-19T00:36:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T22:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mono-1en-2578"},"modified":"2010-06-19T00:36:00","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T22:36:00","slug":"ask-a-philosopher-which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/2010\/06\/19\/ask-a-philosopher-which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask a philosopher: ‘Which came first: The chicken or the egg?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhich came first: The chicken or the egg?<\/em><\/p>\n

\tThis is a factual, rather than a philosophical question.
\n\tHowever, it is a legitimate task for philosophy to analyse the
\n\tconditions under which it would be correct to say that the chicken came
\n\tfirst, as well as the conditions under which it would be correct to say
\n\tthat the egg came first.<\/p>\n

\tIf the theory of Creationism is true, then God could have
\n\tcreated the first chicken, which hatched the first egg, or He could
\n\thave created the first egg, from which the first chicken hatched. Either
\n\ttask would have been equally easy (or difficult). Unfortunately, the
\n\tinformation which would enable us to answer this question is missing
\n\tfrom the Book of Genesis.<\/p>\n

\tIf Darwin’s theory of evolution is true, then we can say
\n\tthat the ‘trick’ of producing a soup of proteins and fats enclosed in a
\n\thard casing, inside which an embryo is protected and nourished, was
\n\tdeveloped by the prehistoric creatures from which chickens evolved. We
\n\tknow that dinosaurs laid eggs. Dinosaurs are reptiles. The accepted view
\n\tis that birds evolved from reptiles. So in that sense it would be true
\n\tto say that the egg came before the chicken.<\/p>\n

\tBut what about that first chicken? What kind of egg did
\n\tit hatch from?<\/p>\n

\tIf we had the power to go back in time to follow every
\n\tline back of each one of the millions of generations that led up to the
\n\tchicken that supplied your breakfast egg this morning, it would be
\n\timpossible to identify the<\/em> first chicken. There is no single
\n\tcharacteristic, so far as I understand it, which separates a real
\n\tchicken from a bird which is ever so much like<\/em> a chicken, but is
\n\tnot a real chicken. However, supposing there is some unique, new
\n\tfeature, a crucial genetic mutation which separates chickens from
\n\tnon-chickens, it logically follows that the first bird to possess that
\n\tnew feature was hatched from an egg which was laid by a bird which did
\n\tnot possess that feature.<\/p>\n

\t(Geoffrey Klempner)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Which came first: The chicken or the egg? This is a factual, rather than a philosophical question. However, it is a legitimate task for philosophy to analyse the conditions under which it would be correct to say that the chicken came first, as well as the conditions under which it would be correct to say … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"koromo_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-blog","koromo-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/11847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/11847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}