A. Stark Place

Apparently a team of especially smart people has solved the age old chicken and egg controversy. According to them, it was the egg that came first.

…a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg. [read more]

I wonder who this philosopher was, because he should have told his genetisist friend that this is not an adequate explanation. I will put the fact that their theory rests on certain unproven assumptions aside, and center on the fact that the fundamental problem remains unsolved. It is insulting to our intelligence that these so-called experts are pretending this question is actually about chickens and eggs.

The philosophical problem that is more important, and especially important to evolutionary theorists (although much harder for them to answer), is “how can an animal exist without the mechanism that brought about its existence being existent first?” They may say that a chicken was a mutation of a slightly different animal, perhaps a reptile, but what came first, the first egg laying animal, or the first egg?

Consider what the answer might be to this more meaningful version of the question. The same evolutionary theory that this team appeals to says that an animal of a kind (in this case the egg laying kind) must be existent before the act of egg laying first occurs. After all, evolutionists say that mechanisms of reproduction also come about through mutation. I will leave the question of who the first egg laying animal mated with, and whether the first egg laying animal was a chicken, to you.

Maybe these guys knew what the real question was, couldn’t answer it or the further questions it led to, and proceeded to make the news by answering a question that, while much easier to answer, no one was really asking.

But my question is this: If these findings resulted from reasoning that centred around evolutionary theory, what was the point of including a chicken farmer on the team? Did he provide dinner? To come to their conclusion, all they needed was an 8th grade science text book, unwavering belief in evolution, a childish understanding of philosophy, and the knowledge that chickens lay eggs. I hope they didn’t need the chicken farmer to tell them that chickens lay eggs.

Related Tags: evolution, news, philosophy

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Update: Magic Statistics posts on this story as well as some chicken statistics here.