Knowledge and experience: the chicken and egg of acquiring wisdom

It was one of my favourite and life-affirming interests that drew my attention last week. In a word, it was a story about chickens. I have kept hens more or less for the past 50 years. So let’s start with a question about a question. Who was it that first asked the question ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg’?

It was a chap called Plutarch. He was a philosopher, priest, historian and magistrate. The question stems from the fact that all chickens hatch from eggs and all chicken eggs are laid by chickens*. Plutarch wrote about this dilemma way back in the first century. He was a man ahead of his time. One of the things he challenged was whether white, old men were the right kind of people to hold positions of power in public office. Given the appalling events in the Oval Office last Friday, he may have been correct. Plutarch was also vegetarian. Even before the term was first coined, he was writing about the ethics of eating meat.

It was another ‘man of the cloth’, the Reverend William Cowherd who in the 19^th century is said to have been the catalyst behind the term vegetarian. He set up, what at the time, was an alternative church in Salford (Greater Manchester) in protest to the Wesleyan form of Methodist worship. John Wesley and others like him avoided meat because they thought it was good (they avoided sex for the same reason). Cowherd and his followers on the other hand avoided meat because they thought it was bad for one’s health and out of compassion for animals. Like me, who’s been a vegetarian for over 50 years now, they did however, eat eggs and cheese. The Vegetarian Society was established in 1847, by which time the movement was no longer associated with the church or religion.

Plutarch’s question has, over time, moved through religious and philosophical considerations, and these days this casual dilemma is addressed through science, and in particular, evolutionary biology. It’s clear that when thinking about eggs only, they came first. It appears that the first hard-shelled eggs capable of producing life on land, rather than water, evolved some 312 million years ago. How such eggs were then produced by chickens is less clear. Most modern-day chickens can be traced back to red jungle fowl, and quite how they evolved to produce hard-shelled eggs is much less understood.

One of the first questions posed to the AI programme ChatGPT was Plutarch’s ‘what came first, the chicken or the egg’? The AI response was ‘the egg’ – when asked why, the software simply replied ‘evolution’. Interesting but worrisome. I wonder whether future generations, or even the current generation, might lose their sense of curiosity of how our thinking has developed over time? Will they worry over what issues or concerns might have influenced our understanding of the world? Will they even be interested in finding out more than just a simple AI answer? I hope not.

These days I see countless examples of AI-generated communications, stories and explanations. Indeed, my laptop will ask me if I would like the assistance of AI to improve my blog writing. I always decline. No need, when I have Jane, whose recovery journey is definitely one of improvement, and she is always on hand to help find ways to enhance my writing!

It is the process of thinking and learning involved in creating each week’s blog that truly interests me. I don’t think AI will ever replace the learning that comes from experience. A ‘knowing through doing’ approach to life, which is where I return to that chicken story. It’s a story of the impact in the US of rampant bird flu. It is devasting chicken flocks, no hens, and the scarcity of eggs, is pushing the price of eggs to almost unaffordable levels.  

Just like during the Covid pandemic, when people realised about the vulnerabilities in the food supply chain and started to grow their own vegetables, people have started to keep chickens in their backyards. In doing so, they are discovering that it’s not a cheap and easy way to get eggs. Predators, bylaws, the price of feed or unhappy neighbours, are just some of the problems folk are encountering. And that presupposes they are able and could afford to buy the chickens in the first place. All problems that are surmountable of course, but it does take experience and the ability to learn from experience to do so. It was Isaac Asimov who said ‘the saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom’ – for all our futures, I hope this doesn’t continue to be the case.

 

*we currently have a chicken sitting on a clutch of eggs, some are hers, but most were laid by the other hens in the same nest box. Her eggs will never hatch as she has consistently refused to allow our cockerel Gregory Peck to have his wicked way with her, and as such they remain unfertilised.