Color me non-intrigued
In a related vein, physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard is now questioning the supremacy of genes over culture, saying that he has changed his mind about whether “culture can change our genes.” Like Pinker, he now believes that “human evolution may proceed much faster than I had thought.” Even more intriguing, “humans themselves may be responsible.” In societies where a stable supply of milk is available, for instance, people evolve genes making them lactose-tolerant, as has occurred in just the last 3,000 to 9,000 years several times in Africa and Europe. In societies where population density is high enough to spread epidemic diseases such as typhoid, some populations evolve genes that confer resistance to the disease.Even more intriguing?? Shouldn't it really be blindingly obvious that if we change the environment, that can change what constitutes "fitness" in the operative environment? What is interesting is that the fitness advantage of being able to consume dairy products would likely to have to be very significant in order for it to become prevalent in those short evolutionary timeframes.
Christakis concludes, “It is hard to know where this would stop. There may be genetic variants that favor survival in cities, that favor saving for retirement, that favor consumption of alcohol, or that favor a preference for complicated social networks. There may be genetic variants (based on altruistic genes that are a part of our hominid heritage) that favor living in a democratic society, others that favor living among computers.” - Newsweek, January 1, 2008
The shorthand construction "people evolve genes" is just horrible. It promotes fundamental misunderstandings about how evolution occurs, which the last time I checked was through natural selection among random, heritable genetic mutations. It's not that having milk around promotes the development of a "milk gene"—such a "milk gene" would be expected to crop up just as often in non-agrarian cultures, but there it would confer no fitness advantage and there would be no reason for it to become prevalent in those populations. "[S]ome populations evolve genes that confer resistance to the disease." Huh? How about "the survivors mate"?
Labels: if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
posted at 7:42 AM
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