http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/05/26/chicken.egg/index.html

 

Well duh! Anyone who subscribes to the notion of evolution could have told you that. I mean dinosaurs were around before chickens right? And they had eggs.

I can't believe people (smart ones at that) wasted their time on this....

 

I deduce that the animal that laid the very first egg ever, whatever species, came before said egg.

Okay, so..where's my grant money?

 

I'd say they rather missed the point of the philosophical debate, but fair enough, its certainly an answer...

 

Yeah, I've been telling my students the answer to this for years. Not my fault the question doesn't specify "chicken egg."

Moreover, if we are really going to split hairs and limit this to chicken eggs, then we need to define specifically what a chicken egg is. Is it an egg that contains a chicken, or one that is laid by a chicken? Once that definition is established, the question answers itself.

 

Okay, maybe a chicken egg came before the chicken but what laid the chicken egg? This proves nothing. Some animal could have taken a crap in a pond of stewing genetic material, the crap hardened on the outside and something grew inside thus creating a chicken.

 

This is exactly what I have been saying for years. The egg itself came before the chicken evolved into what it is. Why this took so long to figure it out is beyond me.

 

Hell my Mom came before the egg....

 

If the chicken egg is defined as an egg laid by a chicken, the chicken had to come first. That first chicken, being first, had no antecedent chicken, and thus did not come from a chicken-lain egg. Where the chicken comes from is then irrelevent to the debate at hand.

However, if the egg is defined as an egg containing a chicken, one has two schools of thought. If you believe in evolution, the chicken came from a marginally different non-chicken ancestor (what makes something a chicken or non-chicken would be another debate - this question presupposes the existence of clearly definable chickens). That almost-chicken laid the first egg containing a chicken, and thus the first chicken egg came before the first chicken walked this earth.***

If you believe in special creation, there can be no answer to this question as we have no way of knowing if God placed the first chicken here as a chicken, or in an egg. There is no way to know it without special revelation by God, or discover of an authenticated first hand account. Since neither is likely, the debate is moot.

***I should add that most of us engaged in this debate assume "chicken" to mean a baby chick or adult chicken walking about on it's own, wheras the term "egg" includes the prenatal chicken surrounded by a protective shell. If we actually look at chicken development, the zygote and embryo are created before the egg shell forms around them. If one considers that first zygote a chicken, then from an evolutionary point of view the chicken predates the egg by a few days.

 

Agree

 

Now if they can nly figure out if a tree falling in the woods can make a sound if no one is around to hear it.

 

How do you define sound?

Nevermind. Dictionary.com has the following relevent definitions:

1. Vibrations transmitted through an elastic solid or a liquid or gas, with frequencies in the approximate range of 20 to 20,000 hertz, capable of being detected by human organs of hearing.
2. Transmitted vibrations of any frequency.
3. The sensation stimulated in the organs of hearing by such vibrations in the air or other medium.

If we go with definition 3, then there is no sound. If we go with 1 and 2, since there is every reason to believe that the laws of physics are universal, then there is sound (assuming a normal tree falling at normal speeds on a normal surface), but there is no way to prove it.

 

Finally something significant has been resolved. We are now one step closer to resolving the world's problems. Good to see research is being aimed in the right places.

 

So, the worlds of science and philosphy have finally caught up to precosious, smart ass first graders.

 

Sorry guys. This thread straddles the line, and I play it safe.