• Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Proto-chicken>chicken>eschato-chicken

    Chickens have “evolved” in recent years more than recent centuries

    We just keep the chicken name but at what point do they become a different animal.

    Evolution is slow and has no definite point in time of “First official example of a 2000s definition of a chicken”

    It’s similar to the paradox of the heap.

    Of course a “chicken” layed the first chicken egg. But if we called that “chicken” a chicken then her egg would be the first chicken egg. Not the one she just layed.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Yeah it’s an arbitrary line. Slow changes generation after generation, but where normally those changes balance out (a tall person is not much more likely to reproduce with tall people than short people), when a trait is advantageous/disadvantageous to survival or reproduction or encourages those with it to only reproduce with others with it sometimes it tilts the scales and slowly a proto deer/horse finds itself increasingly adapted to water to the point its leg bones become vestigial

      • Sludgeyy@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        You do not get a Red Junglefowl laying a 2000s definition of a chicken egg. You get a Red Junglefowl laying an egg with a mutation that that “Red Junglefowl” will pass on.

        Every generation the Red Junglefowl becomes closer to the 2000s definition of a chicken.

        It wasn’t a “mutant” in the sense that one Red Junglefowl was born to create the chicken egg what we know as a 2000s definition of a chicken.