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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DanD who wrote (68527)	5/26/2008 1:55:14 AM
From: spiral3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542536

What? Even in humans zygotes happen after fertilization. After the egg meets sperm. We seem to be talking about things at different stages of development. In the context of this question, the "egg" in question is usually thought of as that hard thing with a shell, the one the chicken pops out of is it not. Isn't that, what "what came first" refers to to begin with. At the zygote stage, the egg I'm talking about is no more like the egg the chicken pops out of, than the zygote is like a chicken, that's why I said there is no egg when there is a zygote. That's how I've always thought of it, perhaps because I'm not a biologist. Wrong. There was a first chicken. It's called evolution. There was a time when there werent' chickens or eggs and they did not co-arise. The fact that there was a time when there weren't chickens or eggs has nothing to do with anything and they most definitely co-arose, that thing ain't hatching unless both are present. I hate to burst your bubble, but the first "chicken" is a label that we impute upon a certain set of conditions at some point in time along the evolutionary continuum and voila, we bring the, not the actual thing that was there, but we bring the "chicken" into existence and all of a sudden infer "non-chickens" at the same time. Neat trick, immensely, profoundly useful, very powerful, profitable too, but ultimately philosophically flawed. Tell me does this one gene mutation and this alone make it a chicken, because it seems to be that this is what you are arguing - what about the beak, feathers etc doesn't a chicken need these as well to be a chicken. If that's your sole marker, all you need to call it a chicken and you stuck that gene into a tomato, and somehow got it to survive would that then be a sufficient basis to call that tomato, a chicken. Didn't think so. You can choose a single data point like this one gene as a proxy for a discrete division, but really it's an arbitrary decision on your part. You can point to this one mutation and say this is what makes it a chicken, but in reality lots of factors need to come together before we can designate a chicken. Just like there was a first amoeba, first ceolecanth, first duckbilled playtpus, and, yes, first chicken. There might have been firsts in all these things, even the chicken, but that doesn't prove anything, certainly not which came first, the chicken or the egg. There is a difference between an actual unmediated reality, in which chickens and eggs arise, and the reality we experience after we label it. Sorry to waste your time. I need to hit the sack myself.