The Nightstar Zoo

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/apr97.html

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Scharr, scharr, verscharr das Gebein, grab es tief unten im Keller ein.
Später dann graben es andere aus, und nennen dein Haus das Knochenhaus.
Scharr, scharr, verscharr das Gebein, leg auch ihre weißen Schädel hinein.
Mit Beton gießt du es aus, das Fundament vom Knochenhaus.
Scharr, scharr, verscharr das Gebein, da ist noch Platz, da paßt noch wer rein.
Hier tobte sich der Teufel aus, unten im Keller im Knochenhaus.

Of course the egg came first. Nobady said it was the chicken that had to lay the egg that a chicken hatched out of in the first place.

And time for the traditional humorous solution to the problem:

The rooster!

Empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

...interesting note, that link does have another link that makes a good seque into animal rights.

Oh, geez, don't get me started.

/me tries to get Animal started.

Poke, poke.
C'mon, you do good rant.

I do, don't I?

Here's my main thesis, detailed in my book.

Animals don't and can't have 'rights.' The term just doesn't mean anything. They can, should and do have legal protection, but that's not the same thing.

Now, that's a good philosophical discussion. Most of my pissiness with the big animal rights groups (like PeTA) has to do not with the philosophical issues, but because they're a bunch of damned liars. They lie continually, they lie deliberately, they make Micheal Moore look like an amateur when it comes to just making shit up.

Maybe there's a philosophical point. If you have to lie to support your cause, how then is your cause moral and just?

With PETA, I think it's more a matter of whether they're helping their cause at all. So far, I haven't seen it.

From what I've seen, probably not (although I might have seen only the most extreme examples).

Hey, who's complaining? Gotta love it when your opponents insist on punching themselves in the face.

I wrote PeTA several times around the time Misplaced Compassion came out, offering to debate Ingrid Newkirk, live, on her choice of animal-related topics. Their replies amounted to "we don' wanna." She was on an acquaintance of mine's radio show, though. Bad idea. Mike cut her to ribbons.

They do push for spaying and neutering of pets, which is a Good Thing. They're right on that.

Even a busted clock, you know?

Let's see...

Long-winded version: If you accept a consequentialist view point, then the morality of an action is dependent on what consequences the action has. Usually the underlying assumption is one of two optimizations: either maximization of pleasure or minimization of pain. I'm assuming that if PETA was thinking consequentially, then their goal is the minimization of pain as it applies to animals. With this is mind, if in the end the summation results in overall less pain in the system (i.e. Some individuals might have experienced pain because of it, but the summation of the pain others would have felt otherwise is still greater), then your means of achieving that goal are not considered morally wrong.

Short version: The cause is moral and just if you're the type who thinks the ends justify the means.

a chicken fajita omelet came first.

Needless to say, I'm not the type who thinks the ends justify the means, if the means are persistent, deliberate dishonesty.

In general, neither am I.

However, there is a problem if the ends would be say the protection of human life. Let's say you are in a situation where there is no alternative: either lie and save a life, or tell the truth and let them die. And let us also quantify the situation by saying the reason he would die is justified by any known ethical system.

Would it be okay to lie in that instance?

Can you come up with an example where this might happen?

Sure.

Classic example is harboring someone and offering protection from some form of persecution. Be it that you are in Nazi Germany and you are protecting your Jewish friend, or you are in the deep south and hiding an African American friend from a lynch mob.

Now, lets say those who do your friend harm, come to you. And through by holding someone else hostage, they want a yes or no answer: do you know where your friend is.

Do you lie and save his life, or do you tell the truth and let him die?

Yeah, I'll buy that.

Here's the difference between your example and the animal rights groups: You can argue that, in your example, the lie you're telling is serving a greater moral purpose. In the case of PeTA, the situation is almost exactly opposite; their agenda would be harmful to humans in almost every circumstance, and frequently to animals as well. And PeTA routinely lies about the consequences of their own stated agenda.

It's worse than that, actually; they don't even follow their own stated ethic. Their 'animal shelter' in Norfolk had a higher euthenasia rate than any other shelter in the Tidewater area. The animals they 'rescue' from various labs, entertainment venues, and so on, generally end up every swiftly dead. And then there's the Berosini case.

Okay, okay, you intelligent pack animals, I'm going to give this one more try:

Consider the set S consisting of all chickens and all chicken eggs. Let X be the element of S with earliest origin time. Is X a chicken or a chicken egg?

Of course, this all ultimately depends on how we define "chicken egg." The two standard options are "an egg laid by a chicken," in which case the chicken (specifically, the one that laid the first chicken egg) came first, and "an egg from which a chicken will hatch at some point in the near future," in which case the answer is indeterminate.

There is, however, a more zenny way of looking at the problem:
The chicken and the chicken egg are not separate entities. The chicken egg is simply a young chicken, and the chicken is simply an old chicken egg. The (chicken/chicken egg) came into being at the same time as itself.


-=-Barnabas

oh for crying out loud, as detailed earlier in this thread, there've been eggs around a heck of a lot longer than there have been chickens. BA-BAWK!

As for PETA, I think most of them are nuts. But at least they're nuts who'll talk supermodels into sitting naked in a cage, in public. Though I'm not really sure that's the kind of attentiion they were going for.

I know that. But I'm not talking about eggs in general; I'm talking about chicken eggs (read my post again, carefully this time), which is quite clearly what the original question meant.


-=-Barnabas

But while the chicken could not have come out of a non-chicken egg, a chicken egg could have come out of a non-chicken... assuming you're not a very strict creationist. The only possibility is that the egg was first.

The single cell came before the multicell. This idea works no matter how far back you decide a chicken became a chicken, so long as the first chicken is defined as being multicellular (an egg is just the first cell of a multicellular organism... I'm not aware of the possibility for a single-cell organism to lay an egg).

Why not? Why couldn't a chicken hatch out of, say, an archelon egg? Alternatively, why couldn't some other animal change into a chicken, and then start laying eggs?



As I said, it depends on how you define "chicken egg." It could easily be interpreted as meaning "an egg that was laid by a chicken," in which case a chicken egg could not have come out of a non-chicken (unless you put it into the non-chicken first... ewww...)



Well, there was that one time Fred Paramecium made an unintentionally suggestive comment about Amy Amoeba's pseudopod...


-=-Barnabas

As mentioned, an egg is merely the first cell of a chicken. If it will become a chicken, it is a chicken egg. By the same token, if it won't become a chicken, it is not a chicken's first cell, and thus not a chicken's egg.

Defining an egg as the product of whatever laid it doesn't make a world of sense, however. For instance, it seems silly to describe the first "egg" of a multicellular organism evolved from the paramecium as a "paramecium egg". Naturally it didn't (necessarily) happen that way, so let's expand the concept.

If you accept that single-cell organisms don't have eggs, and that single-cell organisms are the only predecessors of multicell organisms, then it makes sense to define the simpler construct as part of the more complex construct. The egg is part of the chicken (similar to what you said above in your zen thing... I just don't like zen as a solution to logic puzzles). Therefore a chicken egg is an egg that hatches a chicken, and the first chicken egg is the first egg that hatched a chicken.


Well, there was that one time Fred Paramecium made an unintentionally suggestive comment about Amy Amoeba's pseudopod...

That's not a chicken egg; that's a chicken zygote.



Y'know those round white things that come in cartons of twelve at the grocery store? They won't become chickens. But they were laid by chickens. Everyone I know calls 'em chicken eggs.



Okay, so at what point in time do you draw the line between the paramecium and some other species descended from the paramecium? D'ye have some point at which a paramecium undergoes mitosis and produces not two paramecia, but a paramecium and something else?

(Note: I'm not a moron with no understanding of evolution; I'm just playing devil's advocate with semantics.)



Internally, yes, that's a fine and consistent way of going about defining things--but it doesn't match up with common usage. When people say "chicken egg," they mean "an egg laid by a chicken." Whether or not a chicken will hatch out of said egg--indeed, whether or not the egg is even fertile--does not matter.


-=-Barnabas

The real question here is whether the qualifier for an egg to be "chicken" is whether it was lain by a chicken or whether it will hatch into a chicken. By the second definition, unfertilized eggs are not chicken eggs. Therefore, the egg came first, but the chicken came before the chicken egg.

But then there is the question: is an unfertilized egg (e.g. a breakfast egg) a chicken egg?

You seem to claim intervention doesn't count. I can't stuff a partridge egg in a chicken and call it a chicken egg. By the same token, you can't say chickens we kill and eat aren't chickens, regardless of when we kill them.


The technical description is that a seperate species branches off when it is seperated by ability to reproduce with the other branch, either by geography or biology. We could go as small as subspecies distinctions, however, as we do for dogs. If you killed off all dogs of any size between, say, a great dane and a pug, the result would be two seperate species, yet canus domesticus (I think) is still just one species.

But then you already know that.

Hell, if you want to really get into that, some are postulating that if they discovered a more human-like ape, we would seriously need to redefine how we think of species (this was mentioned in one of the first threads of high energy magic).


Semantics are merely the product of our language's inevitable imprecision. They are evil.


And when people say "I could care less" they mean "I couldn't care less." People will always be imprecise. I wouldn't found my argument on it, however.


On the contrary, it is always assumed that a chicken will always hatch out of an egg laid by a chicken, assuming it ever hatches. It does matter... people just take the conclusion for granted.

I thought I had covered this earlier, but I now realize I only mentioned the case in which a chicken egg is stuffed into a non-chicken. Okay, so change "laid by a chicken" to "grown from a chicken... from a chicken... er..." okay, so I don't know much about the generative organs of a chicken. You get the idea.




Yeah. Chickens is chickens. What does that have to do with it?



Except that definition only makes sense for animals that reproduce sexually. Paramecia are protists that reproduce asexually.



The current method of animal species distinction? Yes. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.



That's as may be, but they're still fun to play with.



Regardless of what anyone else means by "egg," the philosopher who first posed the question was talking about the round white-shelled objects that come out of the cloacae of female chickens which live on farms not frequented by perverted philosophers with too much time on their hands and no qualms about sticking foreign objects up the cloaca of a poor innocent chicken, so that's the only definition we need to consider here.



I don't know about you, but the only thing that hatches out of the chicken eggs in my refrigerator is omelettes. Damn fine omelettes, too.

Eggs laid by roosters, on the other hand, hatch into cockatrices.

The previous statement is both mythically and logically true.


-=-Barnabas

Just pointing out that dinking with semantics doesn't change the fundamental situation.


Aren't semantics fun? Think of it this way... the egg is part of the biological cycle of a chicken. If it didn't hatch from an egg (or some version of one if you want to go into semantics and bring up test tube chickens), it's not a chicken as we know it. Thus the first chicken, as a creature, began with the first egg from which that chicken was hatched.


That's going in my quote file.

If the philosopher meant, specifically, that a chicken egg is an egg that came out of a chicken, then the answer would have to be that the chicken came first.


That's quite a trick.

And off to PIIC!

I get the feeling that that's going to be said a lot on these forums...