The physical sciences are the history of mankind learning to deny the evidence before the five physical senses and see the truth with the mind's eye.
Forgot who said it.
Jan
At some point the question has to be met. It is very bad science to pretend there is a complex way that makes it possible. It is a paradox. It is a total binary with no possibility of a fudge. If you said something that was neither chicken nor egg evolved into both or either I would be no more surprised. The question is simple. How is it possible that it can happen. It can't. The egg came first. I have no idea how. When a bacteria you can say what you like and you most likely will be right. Not so a chicken. The time it takes a chicken to evolve is not the question. It is how it leaps to life no matter how primitive and from where. It is egg or not egg. What name the egg has when born is not really important. Egg is the key point as I can make a fertile egg come to life. Most life is more dependant on an actual mother.
That is the confusion. There was a period when 'something' slowly started to look like what we call an egg. It wasn't really an egg then but in time became one. It didn't spring into existence. Basic evolution.
Jan
That is fine. What people seem to overlook is the need for a familly unit. At some point it becomes binary and there is no mother. It's not the biology, it's self farming. In electronics we have the concept of a bootstrap. I remember my teacher saying it is as if we could pull ourselves into the air by our own bootstraps. In life we can't, yet in electronics we can, he went on to say. Seems to me many need a bootstrap to make these things work. The egg needs to be made to come alive. It needs a mother. At some point in history we need to say how it needed neither yet was one step away from being chicken or egg. Not easy. We are one step away from saying Earth, Air, Fire or Water and that's all there is to it.
In truth a bootstrap is not bad. Hoyle made a joke about the Big Bang. Good job no one took it seriously.
In truth a bootstrap is not bad. Hoyle made a joke about the Big Bang. Good job no one took it seriously.
The chicken and egg paradox misses the crux. What came first? Some protoplasm replicated most probably through RNA. For many millions of years thereafter reproduction was asexual cell division and an egg was not required.
The path from there to the first proto-chicken was long and complex, but the dinosaur egg and its dinosaur certainly came long before the chicken. So once the fertilized egg-laying and incubating to hatch branch of animal reproduction was in place it's a self contained system. A heritable genetic mutation necessarily impacts the gametes so you could hypothesize that each step towards the chicken involved a mutated germ cell becoming a closer-to-chicken offspring. There was no sudden arrival from nowhere of either a fully formed chicken egg or a fully formed chicken. As in "What About Bob?" the secret is baby steps!
The path from there to the first proto-chicken was long and complex, but the dinosaur egg and its dinosaur certainly came long before the chicken. So once the fertilized egg-laying and incubating to hatch branch of animal reproduction was in place it's a self contained system. A heritable genetic mutation necessarily impacts the gametes so you could hypothesize that each step towards the chicken involved a mutated germ cell becoming a closer-to-chicken offspring. There was no sudden arrival from nowhere of either a fully formed chicken egg or a fully formed chicken. As in "What About Bob?" the secret is baby steps!
Here is a speculation. I hope to be the first on Earth to say it in this exact form. Almost certainly all life outside of Earth will have DNA. More importantly that DNA will seem to be Earth DNA. It in truth it will not be Earth DNA and has no reason to need to be. It is simply given what we have in the universe it is the only thing that will exist. How it shows itself I wouldn't have a clue. I have a feeling this will be ture. However it will give rise to useless speculation when in fact it is what should happen happening. To this point evolution is logical. One has to be careful not to jump to " and thus clay will be bricks ".
Whilst I know very little about Quantum entanglement it could be part of what I have just said. You could call it Quantum loneliness. In other worlds it will seek to join with the similar. Maybe.
Anyway. Let's get back to the chicken and egg. Chicken and Egg is just a concept. What it says is at some point there is a leap which in engineering would be impossible. To build a motor car without a factory or machine tools just from your mind. How easy my life would be if I could. There can be no chicken without a family unit. There can be no chicken without protection from other animals. There can be no chicken without a viable number of DNA variation. The latter is the easiest. The chicken is a well chosen higher life form. If people will not see this paradox they don't want to. If it were me I would say it's too long ago and we can not say. People don't, so it means they are looking as hard as me at the truth. The light in the fridge is easy. Push the switch with your finger. Lets not pretend we learnt from that.
Louis Pasteur had proved to businessmen that he knew how to stop products spoiling. The people who knew better than him knew he was seriously wrong. So whilst business got on with what he taught the experts thought him a fool. The fool Pasteur was working against the spontaneous generation of bacteria " fact ". The major objection to his method was he was causing the bacteria to die which had no connection with how they got to be inside someone. Finally he made a swan neck tube that disproved their concepts. It is well known so that's all I will say. Did the Chicken spontaniously generate? Remember Chicken is any higher type that needs some type of mother and a safe family unit.
Whilst I know very little about Quantum entanglement it could be part of what I have just said. You could call it Quantum loneliness. In other worlds it will seek to join with the similar. Maybe.
Anyway. Let's get back to the chicken and egg. Chicken and Egg is just a concept. What it says is at some point there is a leap which in engineering would be impossible. To build a motor car without a factory or machine tools just from your mind. How easy my life would be if I could. There can be no chicken without a family unit. There can be no chicken without protection from other animals. There can be no chicken without a viable number of DNA variation. The latter is the easiest. The chicken is a well chosen higher life form. If people will not see this paradox they don't want to. If it were me I would say it's too long ago and we can not say. People don't, so it means they are looking as hard as me at the truth. The light in the fridge is easy. Push the switch with your finger. Lets not pretend we learnt from that.
Louis Pasteur had proved to businessmen that he knew how to stop products spoiling. The people who knew better than him knew he was seriously wrong. So whilst business got on with what he taught the experts thought him a fool. The fool Pasteur was working against the spontaneous generation of bacteria " fact ". The major objection to his method was he was causing the bacteria to die which had no connection with how they got to be inside someone. Finally he made a swan neck tube that disproved their concepts. It is well known so that's all I will say. Did the Chicken spontaniously generate? Remember Chicken is any higher type that needs some type of mother and a safe family unit.
Yes, but it might as well be that there is non-DNA based life somewhere. We only know our kind of life, and we can't even imagine another kind.
Jan
Nige, I have the impression you are thinking out loud trying to get your head around how evolution works?
Because all these questions have been answered and filed away long ago.
Jan
I think that is likely and also like water is the natural state of hydrogen and oxygen so too DNA is what is likely to happen. The virus a simple form of life lives between life as we define it and simple compounds. I would speculate as others have that the virus is the key. It is exactly at the turning point to be life. I guess we should say the obvious and that in a vast universe the lottery of existance plays the dices. However the difference is once the dice are thrown no need to throw them again if the result is sucess. It will reproduce itself and will be life at the advanced state in time. Other states are interesting compounds and nothing more. However the family unit is still a problem. It can not exist because the dice say it should.
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