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Chicken vs Egg
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I think it's an egg laid by a chicken. Unfertilized eggs laid by chickens that will never become chickens are still chicken eggs.
That's about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken's egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn't become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.
We're not talking about eggs laid by chickens, we're talking about eggs laid by the things that weren't quite chickens, but the eggs of which contain chickens, due to a novel DNA combination.
The question posed is what is a chicken egg? Is it an egg from which a chicken hatches or an egg which a chicken lays? I'd argue it's the latter. Because we already consider eggs from which no chicken could hatch but that a chicken laid, chicken eggs.