Popular Science
In 2006, John Brookfield was invited to comment on the Chicken or the egg controversy, along with a number of others. All parties came down on the egg first side of the debate. John gives his reasoning as "The first chicken must have differed from its parents by some genetic change, perhaps a very subtle one, but one which caused this bird to be the first ever to fulfil our criteria for truly being a chicken. Thus the living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken that it would develop into, and thus would itself be a member of the species of chicken."
To further public understanding of evolutionary genetics, John Brookfield has created a podcast explaining some of the issues, and as part of the Nottingham University 200 years of Darwin Celebrations, delivered Darwin's famous lecture On the Origin of the Species, in full Victorian dress. He has additionally written in the media about DNA profiling.
Read more about this topic: John Brookfield (geneticist)
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