EDIT : It seems as no one understood what i was talking about and maybe its my fault for not elaborating . I always thought chicken was a metaphor for this paradox and not really meaning chicken as a specific spiece . So my question is how did the ancestor of chicken came to be if it was born (egg) wouldn’t it need a parent or if it was a parent (chicken ) woudn’t it need to be born ? Or did all the creatures start out as bacteria and climbed out from ocean through evalution if so why isn’t any new species being born this way or am i missing something ?

    • novibe@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      The last chicken and first proto-chicken wouldn’t be 1 generation apart. The changes are so small that it takes thousands of generations for anything even close to beginning speciation to occur. If we literally did what you said, we would go backwards forever and when we got to something that looked completely unlike a chicken we’d be “shit, we have to go the other way around and check again, all the animals around this one look exactly like it, for thousands of generations”.