Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2008

The Chicken and the Egg - An Inductive Analysis

In a slight departure from my usual computer science focused musings, I'm going to analyze another logical conundrum that has raged for centuries. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? One of my many online debates clued me into the fact that there is a widespread belief that the egg came first. I even found a "paper" providing an in-depth analysis concluding the same. Unfortunately, the analysis appears flawed. An e-mail to the author bounced, so I figured I might as well post my brief analysis here. A simple inductive analysis suffices to conclusively determine the causal chain. Base case: single celled organism, asexual reproduction via mitosis (given our current knowledge) n implies n+1: species n produces, by its own reproduction mechanism R n , an offspring n+1 with a slightly different reproduction mechanism, R n+1 . Conclusion: the "chicken" came first. In this case, our "chickens" were not hatched from "chicken eggs", but wer