Okay,
this title is going to take some explaining. It comes from a web link
publicized by Science magazine.
Apparently,
until about 1000 CE, the Catholic Church did not make a big deal about eating
meat on Fridays and certain holidays. But after that time, probably as a direct
result of the papal edict, there was a market for chickens. Farmers bred
chickens that were plumper and which laid eggs all year long rather than just
seasonally. These characteristics are associated with a gene variant known as
thyroid stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR), which is now found in virtually
all commercial chickens. Archaeologists (for whom DNA sequencing is now a
standard tool) sampled twelve sites in Europe ranging from 280 BCE to the
eighteenth century and found that the TSHR allele was rare in chickens before
about 1000 CE.
Is
it too much of a stretch to say that the whole modern chicken industry exists
as a result of papally-enforced religious dogmas from a thousand years ago?
Just remember the Law of Unintended Consequences: this is certainly not what
the Catholic Church was trying to do.
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