Chicken Sex: The Joy of Organic Knowledge

Originally written in 2012


Frank Costanza: Let me understand, you got the hen, the chicken and the rooster. The rooster goes with the chicken. So, who's having sex with the hen?
George Costanza: Why don't we talk about it another time.
Frank Costanza: But you see my point here? You only hear of a hen, a rooster and a chicken. Something's missing!
Mrs. Ross: Something's missing all right.
Mr. Ross: They're all chickens. The rooster has sex with all of them.
Frank Costanza: That's perverse.
Seinfeld, S7E11 ‘The Rye’

My wife and I have been playing a conversational game with new people that we meet for the past several years, one in which we try to gleam from them as much as they know about ‘chicken sex’.

So far, we are certain of two things: 1) that a part of chicken anatomy called the ‘cloaca’ is involved…somehow; and 2) that the eggs we eat are unfertilized (usually?).

We refuse to Google it. We cover our ears, yelling ‘spoiler alert!’, whenever a phone appears, its owner hell-bent on solving the mystery once and for all (and ruining our game forever). It’s a great deal of fun to speculate with people on the edges of our social circle, to delight in our group ignorance of so mundane and natural a process. Adam Tramantano reminded me that ‘chicken sex’ has been all along my preemptive answer for what he calls “conversations for information”:

I think what we have today is wonderful. But I sometimes wish we had to rely more on people to find things out. Because of the internet, the reliance on conversations for information is lacking except for those esoteric things that we need to know.

Our new acquaintances are more often perplexed than disturbed by the inquiry in its directness; ‘chicken sex’ seems like such a commonplace and — presumably — well-understood phenomenon, perhaps because it used to be just that. Over the generations, we’ve relegated the preservation of vast quantities of human knowledge out of our minds and first to the group of people who need and utilize this knowledge (farmers), then to the printed volumes that store this knowledge (encyclopaedia, agriscience textbooks), and now, probably (but maybe not?), to the digital archives of the Internet.

The only thing that remains in that chain of neurons is a cognitive hyperlink to “external or transactive memory”, the ability to recall the means of sourcing such knowledge, as Aleks Krotoski has highlighted in her review of a Science article:

…when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.
Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner. 2011. Google Effects on Memory:Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Science 333(6043):776-778.

Please don’t Google ‘chicken sex’ because of this. Keep it organic. Thank you.

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