Re: Re: PHP Brain Teasers

At 11:00 PM -0400 7/5/07, Robert Cummings wrote:

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 22:44 -0400, tedd wrote:

At 4:48 PM -0400 7/5/07, Daniel Brown wrote:

On 7/5/07, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 15:04 -0500, Kaleb Pomeroy wrote:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The egg, fish were laying them long before chickens walked the earth :)

But actually, it was dinosaurs. Ummmmm... fish predate all land creatures according to evolution.... that's not to say something with eggs didn't predate fish, but I'm too lazy to go look.

Yes, but I was talking about predecessors to the chicken, like Archeopteryx (one of the first feathered dinosaurs), which is/was (my education is dated) believed to be the predecessor of birds. As far as eggs are concerned, they predate fish considerably. So, IF the question is "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" -- then the answer is clearly "the egg". However, if the question is "Which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg?" -- then the answer is much less obvious. Evolution is alteration in the genetic code usually caused by changes in the critter's environment. So, the question becomes, is the alteration of the genetic code found in the egg a random fluctuation of genetic code not found in the parent, or is it the product of a lifetime experience, under the influence of the parent's environment, that changed the parents genetic code in reproduction? Also, there is a difference in the genetic code you have and the code your pass on in terms of dominance/preference with your spouse's genetic code. In other words, male and female produce something different than either of them. However, for both to reach reproduction age, they both had to have "successful" genetic makeup. As such, their offspring has a different chance, perhaps better, of reaching reproduction age and passing on it's contribution. Now at what point does the offspring differ enough in genetic code to be classified as a chicken? That's an interesting question considering that it's offspring may not be a chicken (consider that). Pre-chickens will have to go through numerous generations before producing a "true" chicken in our taxonomy. I doubt that one can demarcate the non-chicken parents from the chicken offspring. So... it is perplexing. Cheers, tedd ===

But dwelling on the topic, the chicken egg problem is actually stated incorrectly to some degree, it's a more interesting question to ask:

    What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg?

Now this question is only perplexing until you realize that the concept of "chicken egg" is ambiguous. Is a "chicken egg" an egg that was created by a chicken, or an egg from which a chicken hatches? As such, there are two possible answers to the age old question...

    Case 1: a "chicken egg" is defined by having been created
            by a chicken.

            In this case the chicken must have come first :)

    Case 2: a "chicken egg" is defined by being an egg from
            which a chicken hatches.

            In this case the egg comes first since the first
            genetic chicken was born from an egg created by
            it's direct ancestor that was not a chicken.

See... it's not perplexing at all :) Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn |

| also provides an extremely flexible architecture for       |
| creating re-usable components quickly and easily.          |

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