What came first: the chicken or the egg?

confutatis

I think your reasoning is correct from a biology perspective, but the chicken-and-egg question is not a problem of biology, it's a problem of philosophy. It's really not about chickens, but about things that seem to originate from themselves. It's a fact of biology that all known living organisms were created by other living organisms, but since life didn't always existed then we have the problem of explaining how the first living organism was created. That's the real chicken-and-egg problem, and biology does not yet have an answer to it.

The link offered in the first post contains some very interesting ideas. For instance, at one point the guy says that every rule must have an exception. That sounds like a trivial fact, but I haven't seen anyone apply it to solve philosophical problems, yet it yields some quite interesting perspectives. For instance, death is the rule in the physical universe, life is the exception. Life appeared out of logical necessity - it's the exception that is required for the existence of the rule. Also, life must have appeared by chance, because there is no point of reference for us to explain why it appeared at a particular place at a particular time. But once it appears, life becomes the point of reference that was missing before.

jammieg

That is the most realistic and logically probable answer I've ever read Phoenixthoth, so much so it is irritating, on second thought it seems all I've done is reductionalized the definition of chicken and egg to the point it is the answer of which it can still be argued that reproduction came before existence since replication is an acceptable requirment for existence, or they came into being simultaneously but hardly anyone is going to agree that something under a microscope is a chicken or an egg. The one exception I can think of is if the last genetic flip of the switch had to do with a pre-chicken that births soft shelled pre-eggs which by chance external luck one one would grow up to be the chicken giving birth to the finishing touches on a hard shell, but the odds of the last mutation having to do with incubation or mother's genetic nurturing tendecies that might relate to producing just the right shell or round shell or unbroken shell are ridiculously slim. Basically I agree the most realistic and logical answer is almost always the right answer, the egg almost certainly came before the chicken.

hypnagogue

phoenixthoth, I think your argument relies on a further assumption that we can be very dubious of: that we can assign a number to 'degree of chickenhood.' The numbers we assign are meaningless if we don't define what it means to be a chicken, and even then we must come up with some system for mapping numbers to degrees of similarity to chickenhood.

A less serious objection is to your assumption #4. Assuming we have created our numerical system of chickenhood, it could easily be the case that x(n) > x(n+1). Perhaps in the actual evolutionary chain of chickenhood, some generation bore a greater resemblence to chickens than its offspring, even if the end result was a full-blown chicken.

The real question, I think, is what is meant by 'egg,' specifically chicken egg. If a chicken egg is an egg that gives birth to a chicken, then as people have been saying, obviously the egg must have come first via some creature that was not quite a chicken itself. However, if a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then obviously the chicken must have come first.

Njorl

First, assume a spherical chicken...

hypnagogue

For one who is wary of making assumptions, I'm surprised that you would be swayed by that argument. Every rule must have an exception-- why? And what is meant by 'rule'? Depending on the definition of 'rule,' one can come up with any number of rules that, at least trivially, have no exceptions. (Example: all colors that are crimson are colors that are red. It is impossible for a color to be crimson and not to be red. There is no exception to this rule.)

Death is the rule-- what does this mean? As you said in a previous post, there can be no left without a right; it is meaningless to refer to one if the other does not exist. Before life existed, there was no such thing as death, so it is meaningless to refer to death as a rule before life, let alone to derive a logical necessity from this on the basis of a dubious assumption.

Rader

Is it possible for a wave to be spherical?

Njorl

Sure. The spherical bessel functions are.

Njorl

rocket art

Hi, am back. May I post my opinion:

It's the egg, by a chicken from another dimension. From whose farm, I wonder.

confutatis

I'm not wary of making assumptions; without assumptions there can be no knowledge of anything.

It's just an assumption.

Any statement that may be true or false. Tautologies are excluded, because they cannot be false.

Notice that 'rule' is defined in a tautological way, which means 'every rule must have an exception' is not a rule, and therefore cannot have exceptions.

Not according to the definition above.

I don't call that a rule, I call it a tautology.

Let me define 'death' first: a portion of matter is 'dead' when we can easily make accurate predictions about it.

"Death is the rule" means "we can make accurate predictions about most of our observations of the universe". And that statement, of course, has exceptions.

That is correct, because there was no one around to make any kind of prediction.

It isn't, because now we can make predictions about what we can observe about the past. Death was created together with life.

All assumptions are dubious so your comment is beside the point. What matters is what you can deduce from an assumption, and how well that matches things you can deduct from other assumptions.

hypnagogue

So "all cats are brown" is a rule? That's an odd sort of rule. You seem to be completely deflating the notion of 'rule.' A statement that can be true or false is usually called a proposition. A rule is usually considered to be something that must be true. You seem to have it backwards.

Vance

I find that the subject title is really funnie, and I am also in a bad mood, so may i ask if there can be smoke without any fire or burn ?
I think all organisms were created from chemical elements...
The chiken is also an organism, his father also an organism, his father's ancestors-tha same ! But if there is no 'parents', there will be no 'children'.
If there is no 'children', there will be no 'grandchildren' and so on...

Just like, if the OP didnt start this thread, I mightnot post anything here, and if I didnt post anything here, you wouldnt understand what i really wanted to talk about...



I think so...

Imparcticle

So, in order for their to be death, someone must make the prediction?

or is your point that in order for there to be death, there must be life? I agree, they are simolatenoeous.

Imparcticle

The ancestors don't neccesarily have to be chicken. They could be the evolutionary ancestors who aren't quite "chicken" as we define chicken to day.

If all organisms are products of chemical reactions, as you have said, then that there need not be chickens that started the race of chickens, rather the chemical reaction started it.

confutatis

"All cats are brown" is a statement that may be true or false. It qualifies as a rule according to my definition. It even has exceptions!

You probably realize I'm just playing a game here, but I don't think you understand what kind of game it is. It's a secret one

Yes. And the opposite as well; you can't have life without death.

Imparcticle

What's to stop it from having a synonym?

Not neccesarily something that MUST be true. Take this into consideration:
-Meriam Webster dictionary

As I have observed, many on this forum do not trust dictionary definitons.
If that is the case with you, take this other point into consideration:

As Stevo intelligently pointed out (in another discussion), science takes finite rules and uses them to describe an infinite set of phenomena. Therefore, because finite rules cannot be compatible with phenomena not within their premises, then there must be exceptions to the rule. Because once in a while, one of those phenomena not in the primises is going to eventually "collide" with the finite set of rules that do not describe it.
Therefore, there must be exceptions to rules.

honestrosewater

Do the premises/rules claim that they apply to anything and everything? Or do they specify to what they apply?
Does infinite imply anything and everything?
Can a rule be rewritten to specifically exclude any exceptions that may be discovered?
Happy thoughts
Rachel

hypnagogue

I don't think that every rule must necessarily have an exception. For instance, if we really wanted to, we could probably manipulate the genetic stock of cats such that the rule "All cats are brown" would be true without exception. It would be a massive and pointless undertaking, but it's possible in principle.

In any case, you are right that a proposition need not have the status of absolute truth in order to be considered a rule. But at the very least, a rule is taken to be a statement that is true in most cases. Simply stating that a rule is any statement that may be true or false deflates the meaning of the word-- we could have infinitely many rules that were not true in the majority of cases, so long as they were true in at least some cases. Even if the definition "true in most cases" is loosely defined, it should be respected or at least acknowledged if we are to use the corresponding word. It is pretty common in the parlance of science and philosophy to take colloquial words and assign to them new, more technical meanings, but usually at least some essence of the defining characteristics of the original word is incorporated into the new definition.