The dilemma of untangling cause and effect is perhaps best encapsulated by the chicken-or-egg paradox. It may provide cocktail party banter, but to an evolutionary biologist, it’s pretty simple: eggs are much older than chickens. At some point, an almost-complete chicken creature produced an egg from which a full-fledged chick pecked its way out. Genetic variation is at the heart of this yolky evolutionary tale—just like it’s at heart of genetic disease research . . .
Published on Sanguine BioScience’s research blog on May 20, 2022