like any time someone brings up the "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" as an unsolvable philosophical conundrum, i am compelled to be like "well the existence of hard-shell eggs predates the existence of chickens by millions of years so it's definitely the egg"

and even if the question is specifically "what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?" the answer will still be "the egg" because the mutation that forms the reproductive barrier will occur in the offspring not in the adult. so the first-ever chicken came from the first-ever chicken egg that was laid by a not-chicken. that's just how speciation works

of course you can keep pushing it further because species boundaries are fuzzy and often poorly defined and introgression occurs in all kinds of populations and you can argue that it is impossible to draw a hard boundary where "chicken" and "not chicken" are distinct categories. but unfortunately i wrote my master thesis on introgression, and fuzzy categories in biology is one of my all times favourite topics to discuss, so. uhhh.

this one is the most focused on the "fuzzy categories" topic, including speciation (plus gender/sex and mental illness)

it's a pretty old video but should still be watchable

this one is more about developmental biology and metamorphosis but it has some stuff about fuzzy categories too (if I remember correctly)

fairly recent substack I wrote about micro-labels and scientific jargon that also goes into speciation and introgression

I'm also finishing a script for a video about parasitic mind control and biological origins of identity/consciousness which, once again, is related to fuzzy categories - I'm still planning to post it this month but that might get pushed by a week or so. idk, my life is a bit chaotic rn

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

"they identify as animals" thats nice, sharon

"no but they actually think they are animals" theres a war going on, sharon