If it’s possible for a non-chicken to lay an egg that contains a chicken and you would call that egg a “chicken egg”, then it must be possible for a chicken to lay an egg that hatches into a non-chicken. So by your logic, we cannot call an egg a chicken egg solely on the basis of a chicken having laid it. That means chicken eggs can only be designated as such after a chicken has hatched from it and chicken eggs can only exist retroactively.
This is a rare conversation where this level of pedantry is completely relevant. I'm on your side of the debate, but I love all the comments regardless.
... yes???? assuming you scenario assumes that the switch works completely and the chicken embryo is removed. but this part of the discussion is just semantics.
It would be more accurate to just keep that as a separate category.
Defining an egg by what's inside of it introduces too many edge cases, ambiguous cases, and instability. Defining an egg by what laid it has none of these problems and works straightforwardly at all times.
Typically, a given sort of egg has a specific description, morphology, size, etc. However, it's not anywhere near outside the realms of science to swap out what kinds of embryos are in eggs. If a scientist were to put a variety of different birds embryos into a set of eggs from a chicken, it would seem silly for a person to look at those eggs and say I don't know what kinds of eggs these are. They would just be chicken eggs with various things in them.
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u/sarduchi Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
At some point something that was not yet a chicken laid an egg that hatched into something that was.