tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post7925704782934541686..comments2024-03-28T19:14:33.619-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: The Egg Came FirstEric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-14824853288086539992018-01-10T05:37:26.951-08:002018-01-10T05:37:26.951-08:00Wow, jqb, you really need to calm down. Your posit...Wow, jqb, you really need to calm down. Your position, that biologists make a judgement call about species—a kind of nominalism, I guess—is perfectly respectable, but it isn't the only one that theoretical biologists take or have taken. And, of course, it isn't the only one that philosophers take (though that seems to carry less weight with you, not sure why). But as an entry point into another way of looking at things, may I suggest that you read Michael Ghiselin "A radical solution to the species problem," <i>Systematic Zoology</i> 23 (1974)? He agrees with you (and with everybody else in this debate) that species are populations, but he thinks that they are, nonetheless, historically extended <i>individuals</i> because they are causal players in evolution. In other words, he doesn't think that a collective composed of organisms is automatically not an individual.Mohan Matthenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18412367867949250445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-31517431262753732252018-01-08T01:20:59.853-08:002018-01-08T01:20:59.853-08:00"Second, as anyone can see via intuitive armc..."Second, as anyone can see via intuitive armchair reflection on a priori principles: "If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."<br /><br />It seems that the intellectual dishonesty of contrived cherry picked special pleading doesn't bother some philosophers, who are happy to run with it if it agrees with their position.<br /><br />If an ostrich laid an egg that was the size, color, and texture of an ostrich egg, most people would say that it was surely an ostrich egg even if a robin hatched from it.<br /><br />Fortunately for resolving the question, neither of these scenarios occur because of the <i>known facts of evolution</i>.<br />jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-40498205208257962812018-01-08T01:09:42.923-08:002018-01-08T01:09:42.923-08:00"I was thinking that P=0 only when changes in..."I was thinking that P=0 only when changes in the "fertilization system" of one or other population ruled out inter-mating."<br /><br />Too bad that this has nothing to do with the biological concept of speciation, which is about reproductively isolated populations, not whether their junk works together. Darwin's finches were categorized based on the morphology of their beaks, not on whether they could interbreed, which of course Darwin couldn't know.<br /><br />"And so the real, true, unidealized position has to be that species don't really exist, that they are idealizations."<br /><br />Snort. Species are <i>vague human categories</i>, not delineated by nature's joints, nor are they "idealizations". Biologists examining organisms and deciding whether they have a new species look at the morphology and (nowadays) genetic distance and <i>make a judgment call</i>. They don't try to mate them with every other organism in existence to see if they can breed with them.<br /><br />"Or possibly that species overlap."<br /><br />Again, species have <i>fuzzy boundaries</i>. Why are so few philosophers able to comprehend this basic fact about language and categories? Since biologists debate about whether two organisms are members of the same species, <i>human interpretations</i> of species clearly overlap.<br /><br />"As far as the idealized world of species goes, I'll stick to my answer that eggs can at best be joint-first, since you can't have population-separation without some existent organisms."<br /><br />This is gobbledygook. Every chicken hatched from a chicken egg, of logical necessity, short of some procedure for producing eggless chickens that never happened. Whereas some chicken eggs <i>might</i> have been laid by some bird that had some significant genetic difference from modern chickens that biologists, for some reason, might want to classify as a different species. But the fact is that evolution works on populations, species are defined across populations, and evolutionary change happens slowly, over a much smaller scale than species, which again are <i>fuzzy</i> categories -- as they must be, to capture this difference in scale: evolution happens both within and across the species boundaries arbitrarily imposed by human beings.jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-3349735608817685922018-01-08T00:38:21.308-08:002018-01-08T00:38:21.308-08:00Matthen argues that: "Speciation occurs when ...<i>Matthen argues that: "Speciation occurs when a population comes to be reproductively isolated because the last individual that formerly bridged that population to others died, or because this individual ceased to be fertile (or when other integrating factors cease to operate)" (2009, p. 110). He suggests that this event will normally occur when both soon-to-be-chickens and soon-to-be-chicken-eggs exist in the population. Thus, he concludes, a whole population of chickens and eggs is simultaneously created in a single instant.</i><br /><br />Aside from any "highly counterintuitive and impractical results", what's important to consider here (and apparently beyond the capability of many philosophers), is that <b>this never happened</b>. There was no instant in which a collection of birds suddenly became reproductively isolated from all other birds and thereby became chickens. <b>It didn't happen that way.</b>jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-78269591038950113862018-01-08T00:32:31.927-08:002018-01-08T00:32:31.927-08:00"A much poorer argument for the same conclusi..."A much poorer argument for the same conclusion runs as follows: Whatever ancestor species gave rise to chickens presumably laid eggs. Therefore, there were eggs long before there were chickens. Therefore, the egg came first. The weakness in this argument is that it misconstrues the original question. The question is not "Which came first, chickens or eggs?" but rather "Which came first, the first chicken or the first chicken egg?""<br /><br />Odd, then, that most of the people to whom I offer that answer consider it to be new information that resolves the issue for them. And well it should, because the more specific question is semantically incoherent, as there was no first chicken, nor first chicken egg, whether one considers "chicken egg" to mean "egg laid by a chicken" or "egg containing a chicken". And it is only by conflating those two meanings that there is a conundrum, because if we remove the biological realities of the vagueness of species categorizations from consideration and pretend that the naive folk concept of a linear succession of organisms is valid, then which one of those meanings you choose answers the question.<br /><br />Funny that philosophers who pay little attention to what people actually want to know complain about "a much poorer argument", and then offer up the sort of ignorant, confused, convoluted dreck seen here that virtually no one in the lay public that asks this question could make sense of.jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-42707176793790942562018-01-08T00:29:27.357-08:002018-01-08T00:29:27.357-08:00"It's the egg, not the mother, that is th..."It's the egg, not the mother, that is the entity that crosses the line between pre-chickenhood and chickenhood."<br /><br />This is appallingly ignorant and incoherent nonsense. Species are <i>populations</i>, not individuals. <i>Populations</i>, not individuals, evolve. At one point in time, there was nothing that could even remotely be called a chicken. Later, there were large groups of birds that were distinctly chickens. In between there were populations of inter-fertile birds, the individuals of which varied from modern chickens along numerous axes. There never was any sort of line, and no individual bird or egg ever crossed it.<br /><br />"Your point about mutations within the egg being in the unborn chicken inside the mother"<br /><br />That's not what he said. You didn't understand what he did say because you have such a confused conception. The point was that all mutations take place within a living organism bearing DNA, e.g., a hen, or an embryo, whether the egg containing it is inside the hen or not. Mutations don't take place in non-living things like eggs (not the shell, the yolk, or other components, only the embryo.)<br /><br />"So, for example, imagine an animal that lives for a million years while all the other members of its lineage have ordinary life spans. Maybe we want to say that it is still the species it was born despite the fact that none of its contemporaries are?"<br /><br />Of course -- only someone with no grasp of basic biological concepts could think otherwise.<br /><br />"Also, since "chicken" isn't a biological term, one might even argue (despite my own way of putting things above) that there's some important slippage between chickenhood and the biological definition of a species. Is there any scenario, for example, on which the drumstick on my plate becomes non-chicken by virtue of something that happens to a population of birds outside the room?"<br /><br />No, of course not. But <i>humans</i> could reclassify the thing on your plate as being non-chicken for various reasons.<br /><br />"The issue gets deeper and more convoluted...."<br /><br />The convolutions are the result of shoddy thinking processes of philosophers.<br />jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-22848082732211685782018-01-08T00:28:58.067-08:002018-01-08T00:28:58.067-08:00"I do accept that animals don't have to b..."I do accept that animals don't have to be the same species as their mother."<br /><br />Then what species are they? There are no species with only one member, except when the species is on the verge of extinction. The only case in which your statement makes biological sense is when the offspring is an infertile hybrid -- but then it isn't a member of any species.<br /><br />"See, e.g., the Papineau quote."<br /><br />Another philosopher who doesn't understand enough of biology to make sensible statements about it. "the crucial speciation event" does not exist -- speciation is not an event. It is a) a process, a consequence of evolution within populations, and b) a human categorization, not a natural fact. Numerous pairs of organisms that can interbreed are classified as being members of different species, and numerous pairs of organisms that can't interbreed (including lack in one or the other of the physical means) are classified as being members of the same species.<br /><br />Anyway, this notion of a "crucial speciation event" falling outside the laying season is completely nonsensical. Even if one takes species categorization as based on inter-fertility rather than the reality of vague categories based on morphological and DNA relationships, what counts in biology is <i>the production of viable offspring</i>. So you wouldn't even know whether this "speciation event" took place <i>until the egg hatches and yields a living offspring, or not</i>. Not that it matters, because in any case, all chickens hatch from eggs, so of logical necessity the egg -- which contains no DNA other than what's in the embryo -- came before the chicken that hatched from it. The only alternative is that the first chicken was born via some procedure that didn't exist at the time.<br /><br />"On the relevance of the father's species, I explicitly discuss that issue"<br /><br />Since searches for father, sire, cock, rooster, even parent fail, it couldn't have been much of a discussion.<br />jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-89892054056303478672018-01-07T23:08:19.313-08:002018-01-07T23:08:19.313-08:00"If a chicken egg must only contain chicken D..."If a chicken egg must only contain chicken DNA"<br /><br />Since, with few exceptions, no two organisms have identical DNA, which the bearer of chicken DNA?jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-62623812914696156192018-01-07T23:04:01.986-08:002018-01-07T23:04:01.986-08:00"Are there examples of mid-life species chang..."Are there examples of mid-life species change?"<br /><br />Of course, since species terms are *human-generated labels*. Biologists reclassify organisms all the time, and in doing so <i>they change whether or not two organisms are the same species</i>. And anyone who insists "that's not what I meant" is conceptually confused, not realizing that there isn't anything else they <b>can</b> mean.<br /><br />Quine lived in vain, it seems. Despite his efforts, people -- including self-professed "philosophers" -- continue to adhere to an incoherent Platonic "museum theory" view of the meaning of words.jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-89630046332230395372018-01-07T22:52:56.952-08:002018-01-07T22:52:56.952-08:00This is an illustration of why philosophy is so in...This is an illustration of why philosophy is so ineffective. Aside from your complete failure to understand biological speciation (which isn't an event, it is among other things a Sorites case of attempting to apply vague terms as if they were precise set discriminators), you folks haven't even bothered to take sex into account. A hen that strongly resembled modern chickens (is it actually a chicken? That's a semantically incoherent question) could have mated with a cock that was at some genetic distance from modern chickens, laying an egg from which hatched a hen considerably less chicken-like than its mother -- contrary to all the ignorant philosophical babble about what can give birth to what. Or, of course, the creature that hatched from the egg could have been a cock. Was that cock a chicken? Was that cock a rooster? These are meaningless questions, and so is certainly the question of whether "the" chicken egg (an ambiguous term -- chicken-producing or chicken-sourced?) preceded "the" chicken. There was a population of birds and ova, involved in a process of evolution, bearing various degrees of similarity along numerous different axes to modern chickens and their eggs.<br /><br />What we can say, meaningfully, is that eggs preceded chickens by about 600 million years. Insisting that that's the wrong answer and that one should try to identify the non-existent precise dividing lines such that it can be determined which came first, chickens or chicken eggs -- again, a frankly binarily ambiguous term across the very dichotomy at issue -- is an errand for fools and philosophers.jqbhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07510836914645398165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-84785500451469284632013-04-10T16:46:58.266-07:002013-04-10T16:46:58.266-07:00That's a thorny issue! If species are partly ...That's a thorny issue! If species are partly defined by reproductive isolation, then there might be mid-life species changes by changing the degree of isolation.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-12509307801832383482013-04-10T16:36:01.911-07:002013-04-10T16:36:01.911-07:00So, it seems:
If the chicken is the first chicken...So, it seems:<br /><br />If the chicken is the first chicken, then by definition it can’t have a chicken predecessor. <br />So, either it is its own predecessor (eg via a mid-life species change) or the egg is.<br /><br />Are there examples of mid-life species change?Richardnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-84140031133937811562012-03-04T22:12:15.636-08:002012-03-04T22:12:15.636-08:00The crux of the chicken-and-egg riddle is: if A is...The crux of the chicken-and-egg riddle is: if A is necessary for B and B is necessary for A, how did the whole thing begin?<br /><br />All chicken and egg questions involve semi-hemi-demi chickens and semi-hemi-demi eggs. They both start as non-chickens and non-eggs. Slowly, they co-evolve into their current state. <br /><br />The answer should not be chicken or egg. It should be. They gradually co-evolved.Wumpusnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-59244775921572460412012-02-13T17:40:11.297-08:002012-02-13T17:40:11.297-08:00If "obviously the egg came first," why t...If "obviously the egg came first," why the conundrum?<br /><br />And why wouldn't the answer lie "solely" as much on a definition of a chicken as on its egg?<br /><br />And again, have chickens really separated entirely from dinosaurs?Baron Phttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04138430918331887648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-17887308113632865732012-02-12T10:26:09.361-08:002012-02-12T10:26:09.361-08:00If the question is merely "Which came first, ...If the question is merely "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?", then obviously the egg came first. Dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before chickens (or any bird) had evolved.<br />If the question is the implied "Which came first, the chicken or the CHICKEN egg?", then...as pointed out...the answer hinges solely on your definition of what a "chicken egg" is.Davidhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01557918124642933595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-18537311909583813942012-02-07T13:24:32.433-08:002012-02-07T13:24:32.433-08:00If an egg can't lay itself, there had to be a ...If an egg can't lay itself, there had to be a first layer of the first egg.<br />Unless the first egg was, perhaps, the god of its limited purpose. Eggs all the way down in other words.Baron Phttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04138430918331887648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-66007017152354360942012-02-07T07:41:33.452-08:002012-02-07T07:41:33.452-08:00Chicken could be a mushroom or tree.
Egg is only e...Chicken could be a mushroom or tree.<br />Egg is only egg.<br />This is evolution.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-60233596803917477572012-02-06T19:47:06.475-08:002012-02-06T19:47:06.475-08:00So that the first bona fide chicken egg came from ...So that the first bona fide chicken egg came from a chicken, no?Baron Phttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04138430918331887648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-46052035153260986432012-02-06T17:31:16.910-08:002012-02-06T17:31:16.910-08:00Baron P,
If a chicken egg must be laid by a chick...Baron P,<br /><br />If a chicken egg must be laid by a chicken, yes, the first chicken came from an almost-chicken egg.<br /><br />If a chicken egg must only contain chicken DNA, the first chicken egg (that is, the first egg to contain a chicken) came from an almost-chicken.<br /><br />The way I see it, again, it hinges completely on how to define the chicken egg.khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15540754975897792612noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-48493279732073365162012-02-06T16:14:12.180-08:002012-02-06T16:14:12.180-08:00Kyle said...
*If an individual cannot change spec...Kyle said...<br /><br />*If an individual cannot change species, and a "chicken egg" is an egg with solely chicken DNA, the egg must have come first.*<br /><br />Are you in that case arguing that the first chicken came from an egg, but not a chicken egg? Since a chicken egg could only have been laid by a chicken?<br /><br />And thus that the dinosaur-like ancestors of chickens did not evolve chickens until they had laid them in a more dinosaurian egg? And that the chicken then evolved the chicken egg? So a dinosaur egg certainly came before a chicken, but the chicken egg came after?<br /><br />But that leads back to whether there was a first egg or first chicken ancestor. I tend to think the ancestor developed the egg after the cell division process became ineffective for evolving multicellular beings. What do you think?<br /><br />Of course if you're assuming that the bona fide chicken egg came before the chicken, then the dinosaurs that evolved and laid the chicken had to evolve the chicken egg first and have it there before the chicken evolved during or after the laying of the egg, How to evolutionarily select the chicken egg before the chicken is of course a question.Baron Phttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04138430918331887648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-69387519730519757492012-02-06T10:30:21.024-08:002012-02-06T10:30:21.024-08:00Life forms evolve functions and forms through lear...Life forms evolve functions and forms through learning from experiences and each other, and that learning occurs not just in their brains but elsewhere in their bodies. Assisted by the advantage of accident, we engineer our own adaptive mutations as it were.<br />They occur gradually in our forms, but since we experience life less in our eggs than in our maturity, the adaptation occurs when we are best able to react to our environment - which is not when protected from it by an eggshell.Baron Phttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04138430918331887648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-68783248161321129112012-02-05T17:44:17.229-08:002012-02-05T17:44:17.229-08:00Baron P, if an individual almost-chicken can becom...Baron P, if an individual almost-chicken can become a chicken over the course of its lifetime, voilà! The chicken came first.<br /><br />If an individual cannot change species, and a "chicken egg" is an egg with solely chicken DNA, the egg must have come first.<br /><br />There are really only so many possibilities, and each has a distinct solution.khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15540754975897792612noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-91949804010498534662012-02-05T16:26:52.201-08:002012-02-05T16:26:52.201-08:00Brian, what does that have to do with anything con...Brian, what does that have to do with anything concerning the functional role of eggs? In any case it takes a significant group to similarly adapt to the new traits before you change the species' genotypes - even when we resort to directed evolutionary breeding.<br />Kyle, your book is way out of date.Baron Phttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04138430918331887648noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-28455758664307879162012-02-05T15:20:51.254-08:002012-02-05T15:20:51.254-08:00The evolution book I read says that speciation wor...The evolution book I read says that speciation works through minuscule genetic differences between mother and child; do tell if yours differs. Minuscule change is change nonetheless, so wherever you draw the line for "chicken", and whatever breed you choose, the first chicken wasn't born from a chicken.khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15540754975897792612noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-38232331451086439292012-02-05T15:17:38.723-08:002012-02-05T15:17:38.723-08:00Baron, what if what we call a "chicken" ...Baron, what if what we call a "chicken" spontaneously reappears in the original population - if "chicken" is just a subset of a larger population, but eventually gets split?<br /><br />Let's take a population of jungle fowl that has three subpopulations - white, brown and black. White is the dominant allele and can interbreed with brown and black. Brown and black are recessive alleles - both can interbreed with white and their own allele, but brown/black offspring are sterile. The brown population is what we'd call "chickens" - the brown allele is tightly coupled with increased egg laying and docility - while the others are what we'd call "jungle fowl". But as long as white fowl exist, "chickens" spontaneously arise from the "jungle fowl" group whenever a white/brown mates with another white/brown.<br /><br />Now, a new predator species moves into the area and selectively kills white fowl. Suddenly, brown chickens and black jungle fowl are the only ones left - and they can't interbreed. Where once there was one species, there now are two. Genetic information can no longer be exchanged and they begin to drift apart - the browns become more "chicken-y" and the blacks become more "fowl-y".Brian Ersthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00430216957767595314noreply@blogger.com