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 ?
But that line can only ever be imaginary. There was never a proto-chicken that birthed a chicken. All chickens were birthed by chickens, all proto-chickens birthed proto-chickens.
We can make an imaginary line, but if went looking for it we would never find it.
Nonsense. All you do is say “Here is what defines a chicken” and then, advancing backwards through the generations, point to the first creature who didn’t meet that criteria. That’s your “proto-chicken” and everything after it is a “chicken.” Yes, the last proto-chicken and first chicken would be considered the same species as one another if we were building a taxonomy of species today, but we’re not; this is a historical exercise.
The definition may be based on some scientific criteria that’s specific to a point-in-time and may be somewhat arbitrary as a result, but it’s not “imaginary.”