Forums » Smalltalk » What is the opposite of a horse?

Fantax I adore you.

That's actually really easy to answer. From a scientific standpoint, something that qualified as an "egg" evolved long before anything that would make sense to call a "chicken."

Some folks like to argue that that can be reversed if you specify a chicken egg, but there's issues with that claim

1. It requires there being a point where a person can say, "okay, this is officially the first chicken" - but evolution works so slowly and minutely that there is no clear point where one organism isn't a chicken and the next is.
2. If there were a clear point, you still have to define if a "chicken egg" is an egg laid by a chicken (chicken first) or an egg that a chicken hatches from (egg first).
3. The original question can be read as implying it means a chicken egg, but it does not actually specify that in words; it just says "the egg."

Meanwhile, from a religious standpoint, it depends on what the religion in question says. Some refer to animals being created without any prior mention of eggs - which would mean chicken first. Others mention an egg of some form existing prior to any animals - which would mean egg came first. And some have wording that makes it ambiguous, like having some object that hatches like an egg prior to anything else existing, but without calling it an egg - such as having something specified to be a rock that hatches into something, and then it can be debated whether or not that "rock" therefor qualifies as an "egg."

I always liked the answer "the egg, but it was laid by something that wasn't a chicken."

You are absolutely right Zelphyr, but see, even yourself give a philosophical answer 😉
Yes, the egg was laid by something else and, I read this somewhere, the Tyrannosaurus rex should be considered as an ancestor of today’s chicken….
Unfortunately, the avians are off topic here, as it’s about equines.

Oh how I like such discussions and as Zelphyr said already, it’s likely more to get to know who is answering, than the answer itself.
Still I’d love to read what the asker considers as explainable opposite of a horse
yes I do adore horses

Horses are fast, so we need something slow.
Horses have limbs, so we need something that doesn’t have any
Horses are mammals, so we need something that isn’t one.
Horses are multicellular beings, so we need something that isn’t one.

I consider that the opposite of a horse.. is a unicellular bacterium, part of the Bacteria domain. Anything that is the farthest from a horse in the evolutionary tree is something that is the opposite of a horse.

But if you want something that isn’t alive, I consider.. a concept of nothing. Because horses are not a concept, nor are they inorganic, nor do they exist exclusively in one’s thoughts and mannerisms and words. A horse can comprehend a world with nothing (which I consider fundamentally different from a world without anything) but the concept of nothingness can not comprehend a horse.

Two horses