A claim circulating widely on social media says that science has definitively confirmed that the chicken came before the egg, as a protein present in eggshells is only produced by chickens.
However, experts clarify that this interpretation is incorrect. The protein ovocleidin-17 plays an important role in the formation of chicken eggshells, but it does not answer the question of which came first from an evolutionary perspective.
According to evolutionary biology, eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before modern chickens appeared. Scientists believe that the first modern chicken hatched from an egg laid by an ancestral bird that was almost identical to today's chicken, but had minor genetic differences.
This means that the discovery of the protein does not change what is known to date about evolution: eggs existed long before modern chickens, and the claim that science has definitively proven that "the chicken came before the egg" is fake news.
