Gauntlet: Thrown

Welcome, folks, to round two (or three? maybe it's three) of dueling researchers' week here at Coasting Richly.

Despite her lack of confrontational language (ain't it just like a pacifist...) Julie oh-so-casually provided a link to what I, yesterday, could not: a cartoon of the chicken and egg joke.

Now, it's not a New Yorker cartoon, so the game is not yet won, but I will acknowledge that it's 50% closer to it* than my offerings of yesterday.

So, in the interest of taking things farther than necessary, I will point out that the blogger at Julie's link does, in fact, name and link to her source; it's just that she does so in Portuguese.

Following that link, we find the same cartoon on the trilingual blog of a Portuguese man living in Finland. While he does not credit the source of the cartoon, he does include a link, and it is the material at that link that I offer to you as today's contribution to the topic.

A geneticist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer got together to establish, once and for all, which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Believe it or not, that's not the first line of another chicken and egg joke. It's the summary of a news article. There was an actual study involving a specialist in evolutionary genetics, an "expert in the philosophy of science," and a poultry farmer.

The study was sponsored by Disney and covered by CNN.

Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen; it may not always be pretty, but it is rarely dull.


* Where, again, it = a New Yorker cartoon representing the joke in the form we've all enjoyed here on Coasting Richly.