this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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But if that’s the cause going backwards a chicken would also be able to defined as it’s ancestor, making it not a chicken egg.
Yes the type of egg matters, because the question would than be “what came first, the alligator or the egg”. Context matters.
From that perspective, your perspective has muddied things even more.
This isn't the case, and there's a mathematical theorem describing this called the Intermediate Value Theorem. Basically, if you have a function describing a line you can draw without picking up your pencil, at some point along that line the value takes on every value on that line. Makes sense, right?
If I draw a line separating Chicken-birds from Not-chicken-birds, and show the evolutionary path leading from non-chicken to chicken, at some point it crosses that line. We don't have to know where that point is, we just know it crosses the line at some point.
At that point, wherever it is, we have a bird that meets the criteria of "chicken" hatching from an egg laid by a bird that doesn't.
Besides, this is all pretty moot. We actually know when and where chickens originated. They originated about 3000 years ago in China and India after being domesticated from Southeast Asian Red Junglefowl.
The only wrinkle is that biologists might decide, presumably on genetic simularity, that red junglefowls and chickens are still the same species, like has been done with dogs and wolves.
That would mean the chicken came first, because it was the taming that made it a chicken.
In such a case, we would simply need to look backward in history until we find an ancestor that doesn't meet the chicken criteria. Fowl as a clade were separated from other bird clades before the K-T Extinction Event, and many such species before the event had teeth, which means they weren't chickens.