EDIT : It seems as no one understood what i was talking about and maybe its my fault for not elaborating . I always thought chicken was a metaphor for this paradox and not really meaning chicken as a specific spiece . So my question is how did the ancestor of chicken came to be if it was born (egg) wouldn’t it need a parent or if it was a parent (chicken ) woudn’t it need to be born ? Or did all the creatures start out as bacteria and climbed out from ocean through evalution if so why isn’t any new species being born this way or am i missing something ?

  • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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    9 months ago

    Something not defined as a chicken would have to lay an egg that hatched something defined as a chicken at some point. Otherwise we couldn’t have chickens.

    But as you say the definition is the problem with this question.

    • Ashy@lemmy.wtf
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      9 months ago

      Something not defined as a chicken would have to lay an egg that hatched something defined as a chicken at some point. Otherwise we couldn’t have chickens.

      Yep. But at least with our current definition of what a “species” (roughly a group of organism that can interbreed and have fertile offspring), that’s not possible.

      If some not-chicken would lay an egg that hatches a chicken, that chicken would have nothing to breed with. It would basically be a genetic defect that makes it infertile.