***** I got this from a friend of mine, I found it really interesting, so I thought I'd pass it on. I edited out all the irrelevant letter stuff, so if it sounds a bit choppy, that's my fault!
We had gotten one of those "fill out all yur personal answers and forward it to yur friends" letters, and one of the questions was "which came first?", so that is how this all came about.... XOXOXOXO s_squared******
...Anyway, I assumed that the "what came first?" question was alluding to that cliched and seemingly unanswerable question, "Which came first:
the chicken or the egg?" If you believe in evolution,
then the question is quite straightforward and poses no real paradox.
The answer, of course, is the egg.....
If one were to go back through time examining the ancestors of the
modern chicken, one would observe an increasing amount of differences
the further one traveled back. Eventually, one would find some early
ancestors of the chicken that are so dissimilar that they must be
rejected as being members of the class "chicken." However, their eggs
would still be eggs. In fact, one would have to go significantly further
back to before the dinosaurs to find eggs that differ with any serious
significance.
If you modify the question to ask, "Which came first: the chicken or
the "_chicken_ egg" (the egg that bears the chicken)?", again, the
answer is clearly the egg. If you once again went back in time to
examine the chicken's ancestors, you would have to eventually draw a
line somewhere, separating the "proto-chickens" with their chicken
descendant. Species only evolve through procreation, which forces one to
define a point where a proto-chicken laid an egg out of which a chicken
hatched. Since that egg must have come before the chicken that it bore,
the egg came first. (Sorry if that last statement sounded redundant... I
just wanted to be clear.)
So there you have it. The next time someone mention "the chicken and the
egg" feel free to open their eyes and explain this to them... (and don't
bother crediting me.... it's not totally original).
***Wes Campaigne***
*** well, I credited him, because i sure didn't come up with it!!!***
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