Animal-like embryos came before animals

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35 points·DoreenMichele··9 comments

So it's settled. The egg DID come before the chicken.

It was settled already. Eggs existed many millions of years before chickens appeared.

I think the intent of the original question/thought experiment was which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg? Not just any old egg.

The answer is still the egg, of course, because the animal that laid the egg was just genetically shy of being what we think of today as a chicken, and it laid an egg with a new mutation that is The Chicken.

So a non-chicken laid a chicken egg and a chicken was hatched from it.

I think this is the premise for the next Alien movie

Prometheus already corned the market on characters with chicken brains.

Ask yourself what the difference between a single-celled organism and an egg is. The deeper you dig, the more you can't imagine it happening any other way.

In other news, evolution by accumulation of variation.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?

Pfft. Everyone knows that.

Actually, the only reason I know what that means is a course I took at https://www.complexityexplorer.org which was presented by Santa Fe Institute. Anyone interested in the origins of life should check it out. The courses are free, btw.

The final exam for the Origins course could be pretty much summarized by what you said. Hopefully they'll re-run it.

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