How humans are still evolving
June 8, 2018 at 6:16 am
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2018 at 6:31 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
Yes, humans are still evolving. Here's how you can tell.
Examples given how the grandmother effect might be making Alzheimer's less common. Why Dutchmen are growing taller faster than other countries. And what's particularly interesting to me is how we should all be lactose intolerant.
I've always eaten lots of cheese and drank milk. But on reaching my 40's I became increasingly intolerant to it. I ended up having a serious cold at least once a week which would completely floor me. It also gave me MS. I now know that it's because of milk because I was lax about checking the ingredients in the vegetable soups I bought in a cafe I've started visiting and had a flare up as a result. The molecular mimicry idea of MS is one of the leading theories for its cause. Namely that a protein that is found in milk is similar to that which makes up the myelin sheath covering nerves. The immune system learns to recognise this protein as a foreign invader and starts to remove it wherever it is found.
The lactase gene is supposed to turn off after the baby no longer needs to be breast fed. So perhaps with people with MS it's still being turned off but much later in life. If so then it suggests that eventually MS will eventually be evolved out of the population, assuming that we are still relying on dairy for our needs and there is a single cause of MS.
Milk is one of these things which seems so innocuous because of how ubiquitous it is. But it's actually quite nasty stuff when you consider its long term costs, both in terms of health (autoimmune diseases, saturated fats) and on the environment.
Examples given how the grandmother effect might be making Alzheimer's less common. Why Dutchmen are growing taller faster than other countries. And what's particularly interesting to me is how we should all be lactose intolerant.
Quote:Humans mostly shouldn’t be able to drink milk past infancy—the majority of adults today can’t really digest it. When we’re babies, the gene that encodes an enzyme called lactase is turned on, so lactase is around to digest lactose (one of the principal components in milk). As we get older, the lactase gene is supposed to turn off. But several thousand years ago, being able to drink milk without getting sick became an advantage in some parts of the world. We’re not exactly sure why, though it probably has something to do with its nutritional value and wide availability on farms. Some evidence suggests that Europeans made cheese for some 4,000 years before any of them developed the ability to properly digest lactose. A few lucky individuals happened to acquire a mutation in the lactase gene that allowed it to stay turned on, even after infancy, and therefore allowed them to rely more heavily on dairy later in life.
I've always eaten lots of cheese and drank milk. But on reaching my 40's I became increasingly intolerant to it. I ended up having a serious cold at least once a week which would completely floor me. It also gave me MS. I now know that it's because of milk because I was lax about checking the ingredients in the vegetable soups I bought in a cafe I've started visiting and had a flare up as a result. The molecular mimicry idea of MS is one of the leading theories for its cause. Namely that a protein that is found in milk is similar to that which makes up the myelin sheath covering nerves. The immune system learns to recognise this protein as a foreign invader and starts to remove it wherever it is found.
The lactase gene is supposed to turn off after the baby no longer needs to be breast fed. So perhaps with people with MS it's still being turned off but much later in life. If so then it suggests that eventually MS will eventually be evolved out of the population, assuming that we are still relying on dairy for our needs and there is a single cause of MS.
Milk is one of these things which seems so innocuous because of how ubiquitous it is. But it's actually quite nasty stuff when you consider its long term costs, both in terms of health (autoimmune diseases, saturated fats) and on the environment.
