• Kraiden@piefed.social
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    4 days ago

    Even if you’re talking about chicken eggs specifically it’s still the egg first. The first chicken egg would have been laid by a proto chicken

    • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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      4 days ago

      I don’t think It’s that clear, are eggs named by what created them, or what they contain? I could certainly see an argument that the first chicken hatched from a proto-chicken egg

      • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        The DNA mutation doesn’t happen when the chicken hatches, it happens when the egg is made. So the egg already has the changes that turn it into a chicken egg.

        • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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          3 days ago

          So? This is irrelevant. The question is whether an egg should be “named” after what laid it (ie. A proto chicken egg, which contains a chicken) or if it should be named after what it contains (a chicken egg, laid by a proto chicken).

          I see no reason why the default assumption is that it should be named after what it contains. What if the egg was not fertilised and just contains yolk? Should it then be called a yolk egg?

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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        4 days ago

        I always love to bring up that this boils down to an argument about definitions, given the assumption we’re talking about chicken eggs.

      • Kraiden@piefed.social
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        4 days ago

        Ok, but does it matter what it’s called? If it contains a modern chicken, and it’s an egg, whether it’s a chicken egg, or a proto chicken egg is debatable. But the egg definitely came first

        • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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          4 days ago

          Not if we are specifically asking about whether the chicken or the chicken egg came first (which is what the original comment in this chain implied), because if proto-chickens lay proto-chicken eggs and a chicken was hatched out of one, then the chicken came before the chicken egg

          • Kraiden@piefed.social
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            3 days ago

            Sure but that’s changing the question, the original question is “which came first, the chicken or the egg” not “the chicken or the chicken egg” so the answer to the question, as posed, is definitely: the egg

        • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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          4 days ago

          “chicken’s egg” is the owner of the egg the chicken inside it, or the one who laid it?
          Likewise it’s not clear that “chicken egg” refers to the creator of the egg or the inhabitant of it.

          Pretending for the sake of semantic argument that any of these scenarios were possible:
          If an alligator laid an egg and a chicken came out, was that a chicken egg?
          If a chicken laid an egg and an alligator came out, was that a chicken egg?

          But now consider, you know what I mean by the following phrase:
          “An alligator laid a chicken egg, and an alligator hatched out of it”

            • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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              2 days ago

              “you mean alligator egg”

              No, I didn’t. And yet you still likely understand what I mean, or get close enough to what I mean that it doesn’t matter, unless you’re being intentionally obstinate.

              And what do you think of the idea that the egg is simply a phase in the life of an animal, that the chicken is the egg it hatched from, not just the former inhabitant? In this case how can the egg be owned by the animal that laid it if it is itself an animal?
              Like the caterpillar is the chrysalis is the butterfly, the chicken is the egg.

              • HeuristicAlgorithm9@feddit.uk
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                16 hours ago

                If it hatches into an alligator then it’s an alligator egg, so yeah you did mean alligator egg. I actually don’t know what you mean, because what you described doesn’t make sense.

                And I do think think that, it belongs to that creature just like you belong to your mom and vice versa. If somone pointed at your mom and said “that’s PeriodicallyPedantic’s mom” and you said “Aha! But how can she be mine when she’s a different person!”, they’d probably just say “the fuck you on about”.