In a recent TED Talk, businesswoman Margaret Heffernan explored a very interesting and relevant topic. She touched on the subject of productivity by referring to an experiment by William Mure, an evolutionary biologist. In this experiment, Mure set out to prove whether a flock of chickens could be more productive by filling it with what he termed “super-chickens.”
Basically, these super-chickens were the top egg-producers out of the whole flock. For his experiment, he set up two flocks: one filled with chickens that produced an average number of eggs, and the other entirely with these “super-chickens.” He did this again and again for six generations, continuously breeding the best of the best to discover the outcome.
What were the results and how does it relate to medicine?