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Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg

#21

What's the newsworthiness here? Thousand-year-old eggs are already a common delicacy in China. When preserved properly they not only stay intact, but are also edible.

I'm not actually sure if this is in jest, but for the unaware, "Thousand-year" eggs do exist, but are not actually that old. They are fermented for a few weeks/months.

*Relevant info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg

Re: Archaeologists discover and crack a thousand-year-old chicken egg

#22
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has ever interpreted the question as "which came first, the chicken or the fish egg?" It's not interesting even when you don't intentionally misinterpret it. If a chicken egg is an egg from which a chicken will hatch, then the egg came first by definition. If a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then the chicken came first by definition.

The attribute of "chickenness" is a sorites paradox. So even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall "chickenicity." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

> even if you allow the interpretation of "egg which will become chicken" vs "egg laid by a chicken" (which is quite clever, I hadnt encountered that) you are still stuck with marginal difference between mother and child/egg in overall "chickenicity."

But that has no effect on the answer to the question. Given the definition, it is not necessary to identify the first chicken in order to know whether that first chicken hatched from the first chicken egg (definition 1) or laid it (definition 2).

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