Which came first: duck or orange?

 

A friend arranged pieces of an orange in the shape of a duck.

It cannot be said that the orange was hiding the shape of the bird.

The orange has nothing to do with the bird.

The shape of the bird is an idea, carried by a human mind,

and can be recapitulated by appropriate arrangement of the physical units available.

I imagine the following manner in which this particular structure came to be.

In the beginning, it is only an orange.

Then someone peels the orange and takes out the pieces.

The pieces along with peels and the whites are lying on the table.

A creative imagination captures the mind of the person.

With the core idea of a duck.

Place one piece here, another there, continue with the arrangements.

Use a seed for the eye.

White  for the beak,

Cut the pieces of a peel for the feet.

The ways in which the pieces can be arranged are constrained by the shape that is being realized.

There are very many ways of randomly arranging the orange pieces, and most such arrangements would be meaningless.

Only a very few specific arrangement of the shapes makes sense, as in this case.

I think, the science of structure is different from the science of substances.

For example, it is not possible to deduce the shape of the duck by studying only the orange pieces.

The idea of the duck is implemented, but not defined, by the orange pieces.