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Easter, Chicks and Eggs
April 13, 2017
Tikalon is on a short
Easter holiday. Our next article will be published Thursday, April 20, 2017. Fuzzy
chicks and
eggs are Easter traditions, and this break will allow your
contemplation of the classic
chicken or egg problem.
Image from a pre-1917 Russian Easter postcard.
(Portion of a Wikimedia Commons image.)
This ancient problem is simply stated as "what came first, the
chicken, or the egg," the apparent
problem being that you need a chicken to make an egg, and an egg to make a chicken. The
Internet abounds with supposed
evidence that
Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) considered this problem directly and concluded that neither were first, since both are
eternal.
However, all this evidence is from
secondary sources, and I was not able to uncover a
primary source. This question is missing from the logical place to find it, Aristotle's
Generation of Animals (De Generatione Animalium, Περι ζωων γενεσεως), which contains considerable information about
egg-laying animals.[1-2]
The first discussion of the chicken-egg problem is in
Plutarch's Moralia, a collection of short
essays on diverse topics.[3-4] Along with a discussion entitled, "Which Was First, the Bird or the Egg," are discussions of whether
flute-
girls should be allowed at a
feast, whether
women have a
hotter temper than
men, and the proper time for
sex (
night).
In Question III of the Moralia, we read that the egg should be first, since eggs are simpler than birds, and
complexity arises from simplicity.
"if we suppose that small things must be the principles of greater, it is likely that the egg was before the bird; for an egg amongst sensible things is very simple, and the bird is more mixed, and contains a greater variety of parts."[4]
In light of our mastery of
genetics,
scientists can assuredly answer that the egg came first. The
domestic chicken,
Gallus gallus domesticus is thought to have arisen from a
union between the
red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) and its grey junglefowl counterpart (
Gallus sonneratii), both of these being wild birds. So this chicken egg, not made by a chicken, became a chicken.
References:
- Aristotle, "On the Generation of Animals," Arthur Platt, Trans., via Wikisource.
- Aristotle, "Generation of animals," Greek, with an English translation by Arthur Leslie Peck, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 1943), 708 pp.
- Plutarch, "Symposiacs," from "The complete works of Plutarch: essays and miscellanies," Vol.III, Crowell (New York, 1909) via the University of Adelaide Library.
- Plutarch, "Moralia," Frank Cole Babbitt, Trans., Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 1957), 410 pp., via Archive.org.
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