Friday, July 27, 2007

.: Chicken? Egg? :.

Out of the thousands of mysteries that lie on this world, this one has kept thinkers and philosophers alike puzzled for centuries. The cleverest and wisest of men are stumped when faced with the impossibly difficult riddle of “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” while common folk are reduced wood stumps counting their fingers aimlessly in hope of an answer appearing out of nowhere. I hope that this is at least half as challenging to me as it is to mortal men, and hence shall find out through an attempt to tackle this enigma.

It is natural for us to resort to scientific methods, however hateful they are, when philosophical and logical arguments fail to do their job. From the scientific point of view, this question would hardly be difficult at all. Obviously, the egg must have come first, for long before there were chickens, there were eggs. There were big eggs, small eggs, microscopic eggs, and eggs of all colors, sizes and shapes. There were fish eggs, dinosaur eggs and insect eggs so long ago even the chicken’s great grandparents were not born yet. Surely you are not going to deny eggs of their chronologically superior existence, and spread the blasphemous lies that chickens came first?

Okay, so you want chicken eggs, and not other random kinds of eggs. In such a case, the answer would differ depending on how you define chicken eggs. Is it the egg of a chicken, or the egg out of which a chicken would hatch?

If your definition of the wonderful whitish-yellowish omelet ingredient is the first, then clearly chickens are the winner. The answer is only opposite if your definition is the second. Why?

Well, let us all for a moment pretend that Darwin is right, and place some faith in his theory of evolution, just like real scientists do. We soon realize the exact scenario under which the chicken came into existence. Long, long ago, there must have some kind of organism, very much like chickens, but just not quite chicken enough to be called chickens. Assuming that the method of reproduction utilized by members of the avian family (or more accurately, for those people who take the mugger subject known as bio, the avian class) did not change radically, we can safely assert that there were two individuals of this particular species, and one of each gender. These two almost chickens met, and fell in love with each other instantly. Love soon turned into lust, and they went about doing their business. It was on this fateful day, that somehow, through some mutation during meiosis, and the outcome of the sperm-ova rendezvous was an egg. Not just any egg though, but an egg containing an embryo, and more importantly, an embryo that has the DNA of a chicken. The female went about the painful process of laying the eggs and then incubating them, while the male wanders off elsewhere to enjoy further use of his genitalia. Unfair, all those feminists out there might think. Well, neither could be blamed for what happened for what they did were only their natural duties.

One fateful day, a soft but faintly audible sound was heard coming from within the egg. A thin crack developed on the shell, and this soon grew into a long fault line. Abruptly, a great yellow mass of feather, bones, beak and talon emerged from the neither-spherical-nor-ellipsoid object, and behold! For a chicken was born.
Now, if you are intelligent enough you should have already understood my argument, and if you are one who has an intelligence quotient less than your shoe size… Well let’s just put it in a nice way: This blog wasn’t meant for the reading pleasure for those who constantly face mental challenges when attempting to understand simple things. So maybe go to the children’s section in some national library and who knows? Perhaps there would be some interesting book that which is just right for your level. Or perhaps you might want to consider learning the alphabet first.

Of course, on the other end of the spectrum there might be some of you who realize that all that I have put forth were the scientific and logical arguments, and being a devout wentaoist you do very well know that scientific and logical conclusions are hardly ever conclusive. For a better scope on this let us consider some other angles through which we can consider this problem.

Firstly, let us take a small peek at the religious aspect of this problem. Now each religion has its own idea of how the world and the living things on it came about, but it would be fair to say that most of them place some faith in creationism. According to these religions, god created all the living things on earth. If god created eggs first, then there won’t be any chickens today because there weren’t any hens around then to incubate those first batch of eggs. Hence, chickens first.

Next, the Chinese calligraphic aspect: the Chinese characters representing eggs are 鸡蛋. Clearly, you can see that when writing the word, the 鸡 character has to be written first before the 蛋 word is written. Hence, chickens first.

Lastly, here is the truth, also known as looking at the problem from the perspective of Wentao. Since all that is important is myself and nothing else really matters, the important question would definitely not be whether it was the chicken or the egg that came first, but rather which one of them would come first, and enter my mouth, when both are nicely cooked and placed in my plate. Of course, since I prefer a nicely fried deep-fried chicken drumstick to anything else, the teeth mark would most definitely appear on the chicken long before the egg. Chicken first.

Rejected instrumentality at 11:07 PM