> Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. A (perhaps pedantic) correction:

> Either way, ancient Northern Europeans had to mutate into pale-skinned milk drinkers, because their land is not very sunny. A (perhaps pedantic) correction: it's more accurate to say that mutants who were pale-skinned milk drinkers were more successful at surviving and proliferating in Northern Europe, and so the population gained this mutation. Natural selection is not a driven process, it doesn't have an objective; it is, however, a driving process, where it favors one aspect of a population over another. I think the correct wording is always important when talking about natural selection because these processes are more stochastic then we tend to believe.