Sometimes you find an article online where someone writes authoritatively on a subject and you just have to share it, so here’s a short piece I found about chicken earlobes and their relationship to egg color. Take a moment to read it, and then come back here.

It’s an interesting little article, mostly because it’s complete and utter bullshit.

Where to begin… Yes, chickens do have earlobes, and some are white, some are red, and some are blue or black. Some are also yellow. Some are red with a little white. Some are purple. Green? Sure, why not?

And yes, many white-lobed breeds lay white eggs, and many red-lobed breeds lay brown eggs. Is there a genetic link between egg color and earlobe color? Maybe, sometimes, but definitely not all the time. For one thing, brown egg color is believed to be polygenic, which is how some breeds like the Marans and the Penedesenca are able to lay extremely dark eggs, while more typical brown egg-layers produce something much lighter. So Marans and Penedesenca earlobes must be really dark red, right? Well, Marans earlobes are a normal red color, and Penedesenca earlobes are… white. (OK, not always, but often. I have about a dozen Crele Penedesencas in my yard at this moment if you need me to go check.)

Another reason some birds lay extremely dark brown eggs is that the egg sits in the oviduct longer, allowing more pigment to be applied to it. It seems unlikely that this would have any relationship to the color of the bird’s earlobes, especially because as she ages, her eggs get lighter, but her earlobes stay the same.

And how about Ayam Cemani? The famous ‘black chicken’ that sells for hundreds of dollars, the bird so black that even its organs, blood, and bones are black, and whose earlobes are most certainly black? It lays white eggs. The Cemani is black because of a condition called fibromelanosis, and it has nothing to do with egg color.

The famous silkie chicken is also fibromelanotic, but it has blue earlobes. Why? Because that’s what happens when a white-lobed bird also has fibromelanosis. And like the Cemani, its eggs are white.

My Barbezieux hens, which are a French line of the Minorca breed, have massive, bright, white earlobes. They lay a tinted egg. The egg is indistinguishable from a Dorking egg; my Dorking hens have red earlobes, sometimes with a little white in the middle.

My Easter eggers lay blue or green eggs, but their earlobes are red. As are my olive eggers’ lobes — they’re a cross between an Easter egger and a Marans, but if I decided to use a Penedesenca cross instead, guess what — I could have white-lobed birds that lay dark olive eggs within a couple generations.

Araucanas, mentioned in the article, do not, in fact, have blue or green earlobes, because the breed isn’t fibromelanotic. Their lobes are red. They lay blue or green eggs because they carry an autosomal dominant gene for it. The idea that their earlobe color would have something to do with their egg color is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that blue and green eggs don’t even get their color by the same mechanism that brown eggs do. Brown egg color is present as a coating on the outer surface of the egg, while blue egg color is found throughout the shell itself. That’s how olive eggs are made — brown pigment over a blue shell, from a hen that definitely doesn’t have olive green earlobes.

A scientist might want to look not only at how brown eggs become brown or blue eggs become blue, but at what makes some chickens’ earlobes white. It’s not because they have less blood in them, or less red pigment.m; it’s because the earlobe contains, just beneath its epidermis, large concentrations of crystalline compounds called purines. Eggshells, in contrast, are white because they are made almost entirely of calcium carbonate; if there are no pigments present in the shell itself or on its surface, it appears as pure white. Are we to believe that a single gene, or even a complex of genes, causes there to be both a high concentration of purines in a bird’s earlobes, and a lack of pigments, compounds totally unrelated to purines, in or on its eggs?

The likelihood of any, reliable genetic connection is beyond slim, all the more so because egg color and earlobe color both appear to be autosomal, with blue eggs being dominant, and on a separate locus from any of the various genes involved in producing brown eggs, and earlobe color appears to also be polygenic, or at least co-dominant, in addition to being modified by fibromelanosis, which has no effect on egg color. If all these genes were sex-linked, I could almost see how they could be related, but only if I didn’t know anything about meiosis.

Another little nit to pick: ‘hue’ is not a synonym for color, and I don’t care if you find some online dictionary that says otherwise. I hate when people throw the word ‘hue’ around to flower up their writing, when they don’t know what it means. In color theory, hue means pure color, and as such it cannot mean brown or white, one being a mixture of complimentary colors and the other being the absence of color (if we’re talking about paint; if we mean light, brown is the light reflected by a combination of pigments and white is the full visible spectrum). There is, in fact, no chicken eggshell that is any sort of hue — the blue or green shells are never pure blue or green, they are tints of blue or green. A tint is a color plus white — that’s right, George Costanza, there’s no such thing as a “pinkish hue”. Idiot. (Also, a shade is a color, or white, plus black, in case you’re wondering.)

I’m trying to decide which of these three things annoys me the most: that the header on the website says, “Separating Sense from Nonsense”, that the article is filed under “Nutrition” despite containing no information whatsoever pertaining to food (unless you eat eggshells and chicken earlobes?), or that this complete load of garbage was written by a guy who puts “PhD” after his name. PhD of fucking what?

This crap is published on a university website. A Canadian university — I’ve spent my whole life thinking Canadians were our smarter, more pragmatic neighbors to the north. First Covid and now this.

I might have to start giving out honorary degrees in bullshit from my imaginary university as a check on this kind of incompetence. Don’t ask me exactly how that works; within this context, making sense is clearly not a priority.