3 comments
Comment from: Joseph Smidt Visitor

Comment from: Bernie Visitor

About the chicken and the egg question: I once thought I came up with the same satisfying scientific, non-trivial answer, with the same speciation educational element thrown in. Then someone pointed out that the answer contains a problem of definitions. Is a chicken egg defined as an egg that has an embryo chick inside it or is a chicken egg defined as an egg that a chicken laid. Normally it makes no difference, so no one bothers to define things so exactly. But here it does make a difference. With the first definition, the given answer is correct; with the second definition, we need to go to the next generation of egg before we have a chicken egg. That means the chicken came first. All this assumes of course that the question itself: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?", actually means "Which came first, the chicken or the CHICKEN egg?" If not, you would get a completely different answer as follows: Creatures were laying eggs long before there were any chickens, or for that matter birds, dinosaurs or even land animals. In fact we can safely say that the first egg was probably laid millions of years before there were any chickens, and probably contained the embryo of a primitive fish.
Comment from: Ali Visitor

I recall ages ago back in elementary school people use to bring up the chicken vs. egg debate. Younger than 10 and I still managed to come up loosely with an idea vouching for evolution (well, back then I assumed two different species could potentially cross breed to create the modern day chicken). So while not spot on, I still assumed the egg would always come first.
And here I know plenty of full grown non-religious people who still don't see how an egg could come first. Oh well ;)
Great blog by the way, very glad I happened upon it.
Very good responses. I particularly like your response to the chicken and the egg issue.