A University of Afpuddle researcher working through a box of uncatalogued papers in the state-of-the-art, hypo-allergenic environmentally-controlled Thrupiece archive deep underground in Long Critchley claims to have found an unpublished paper by the distinguished Culinary Bioethicist which definitively solves the long running and hitherto unresolved chicken/egg conundrum. Titled Proleptic observations, critical desiderata and determinative solutions to the pollum/ovum question, the paper offers, says Dr Deepe Dyve, a simple yet wholly satisfactory resolution to the age-old question.
For those unfamiliar with the matter it may be useful to state that the issue of whether the chicken was an antecedent of the egg or the egg of the chicken has proven something of a conceptual minefield or - more properly - an ontological cul-de-sac with no satisfactory solution emerging from at least Greek and possibly Egyptian times. [It should be noted that the even more ancient Minoans did not have the domesticated chicken but rather the Egyptian goose so, for them at least, the problem did not arise.]
The “fact” that it takes a chicken [or more accurately at least two chickens] to produce an egg would suggest to many that the chicken must come first [venire ad primum]. However, the "fact" that chickens are born from eggs [ovum natus est] confounds that assumption whilst offering no very satisfactory answer to the question of how the egg itself came into being [ubi ovum venire?]*.
* NB. Those familiar with the work of Talcott Parsons and critiques of it will know that similar issues attach to “explanation” in structural functionalist analysis wherein a form exists to enable or maintain a function the pre-existence of which is rendered problematical by the absence of a necessary and already extant sustaining form. More plainly if function determines form, then how did the function itself come into being without a form to sustain it? Answers on a postcard please to: Any Answers, Dorset Broadcasting Corporation, Great Heaving, Dorset.
But now Archivist Dusty Fyles says that the Professor made a major breakthrough by applying a form of logic known as Single Transferable Object Replacement Analysis [STORA] in which the same problem is posed in a different context. In the paper Professor Thrupiece proposes that, by substituting arbor/semen [tree/seed] for the provenly intractable pollum/ovum [chicken/egg] instance, the issue can be reconsidered with greatly increased clarity. Clearly, the central concerns remain unchanged: the seed is the exact equivalent of the egg and the tree the exact equivalent of the chicken. So which came first? According to Professor Thrupiece, the answer is now clear: anyone can walk into a garden centre and buy a packet of seeds, take them home and grow a substantial tree. No one, however, can acquire a 120 foot mature [seed-bearing] oak off-the-shelf: ergo the seed must, by common observation, precede the tree. By reverse engineering the STORA we can now say with some confidence - even though we cannot veryfy this experientially - that the egg must precede the chicken [In ovo praecedere debet pullum]. The manuscript is confidently concluded: QED.
Quite why it has taken scientists, logicians and metaphysicians so long to see this now very obvious solution remains something of a mystery - as does the fact that Professor Thrupiece’s breakthrough seems either to have been deliberately suppressed or accidentally lost for so long. Conspiracy theorists will doubtless have a field day, but ordinary citizens going about their lawful last minute Christmas shopping can at last rest easy in the knowledge that one of the world's oldest and most puzzling issues has finally been put to bed. It's the egg stupid!
Our Scientific Editor Bun-Sen Burna adds:
It should be noted that the original edition of the Thrupiece Tables was published with one chapter missing. The manuscript of the chapter in question had fallen behind Professor Thrupiece's Model 8 Ebony Upright Bechstein piano and was only rediscovered when the room was emptied for redecoration in 1978. It is conceivable - even probable - that a similar fate befell the arbor/semen:pollum/ovum paper. As helpmeet and fellow horizontal jogging enthusiast Ms Shelley-Lulette Sizemore has remarked: "Professor Thrupiece was far from the most organised of men when it came to his voluminous papers. Several went missing, some were burned when fuel-stocks were low and several were used for cleaning up after our sessions in the small Chilfrome cottage we occupied in 2003". [HERE].
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