Chicken or egg?

With no Ph.D, there would be no need for a Ph.D advisor.

 

..and at the time the PhD student was not a PhD, but a student.

 

Mmm, prove it :)

 

A tiny problem: who or what mentored the advisor? Were the advisor not competent enough to become a Ph.D themselves, even though, they supposedly had more experience in the field?

 

Same answer as the original chicken and egg problem: The egg came first, laid by something very similar to, yet not quite, a chicken. The first Ph.D was given by something with credentials very similar to, but not a Ph.D.

 

True, true. And yet...

An egg can come from something that is not a chicken, whereas (presumably) a Ph.D cannot come from something that is not a PhD advisor.

 

The animal, it came to life as a bud that was almost like an egg but doesn't 100% fit the definition, but it had a random mutation which caused it's offspring to fit the definition of an egg 100%. We humans define categories over something as fuzzy as life so it makes it hard to fully categorize. But evolution required a lot of "almost eggs" before it produced the first "egg;" just like there were a lot of "almost chickens" before there was a chicken.

 

Right, which contradicts the answer in post #10.

So Shyan has a point.

 

How does it contradict anything? These are two different questions.. A chicken must come from an egg, it can not have come from anything else. A chicken, however may lay an egg of something that's not a chicken. An egg must come from an animal but an animal doesn't have to come from an egg. Evolution has rules like anything else. But like Shyan said, the question doesn't work because there is no clear boundary between a chicken and a chicken ancestor. There is no clear boundary between an egg and an primitive egg-like structure.

 

But wait! The PhD advisor does not have to have a PhD himself, he just has to supervise a PhD to be a PhD advisor!

 

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctorate

The right to grant a (licentia docendi) was originally reserved to the Catholic church, which required the applicant to pass a test, to take an oath of allegiance and pay a fee. The Third Council of the Lateran of 1179 guaranteed the access—at that time largely free of charge—of all able applicants. Applicants were tested for aptitude.[2] This right remained a bone of contention between the church authorities and universities that were slowly distancing themselves from the Church. The right was granted by the pope to the University of Paris in 1213 where it became a universal license to teach (licentia ubiquie docendi).[2] However, while the licentia continued to hold a higher prestige than the bachelor's degree(Baccalaureus), it was ultimately reduced to an intermediate step to the Magister and doctorate, both of which now became the exclusive teaching qualification.[2] According to Wellington, Bathmaker, Hung, MucCullough and Sikes (2005), the first Ph.D. was awarded in Paris in 1150; but not until the early nineteenth century did the term "Ph.D." acquire its modern meaning as the highest academic doctoral degree, following university practice in Germany.