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Think about your usage of the word word people - as opposed to the singular. In a purely random natural selection driven system, propagation relies on the succe

Think about your usage of the word word people - as opposed to the singular. In a purely random natural selection driven system, propagation relies on the success of a single mutated individual until we get to very large populations where randomness could more regularly yield similar mutations among different people. Because of this, in the purely random natural selection system the magnitude of an effect is extremely important. Let's imagine we can somehow quantify exactly how likely a specimen is to survive in a certain area per year, we'll call that value x. Imagine x is some percent per year. How much would a random specimen suddenly developing lactose tolerance increase that percent? In the case of something like Darwin's birds, the percent improvement from beak changes would be very substantial. That mutation would open up entirely new, and vast, resources of food available at all times and completely independent of everything else. In the case of milk, you need a lactating animal to start with. That already implies you have multiple sources of food in extremely healthy shape. That little catch there already ensures that this mutation would not provide a substantial benefit in a one-off scenario. By contrast, imagine our mutations are not entirely random. And that our bodies, somehow, trend towards more desirable mutations over time -- meaning we don't see just a one-off instance of favorable mutations but them tending to occur over and over again. In this case your language of "people" would be entirely appropriate. Over time, even a small survival edge means a lot and, given enough samples, we'd certainly expect this trait (and any trait for that matter) to start to 'stick' in any area where its net effect on survival was basically anything above 0.

pjscott 8y ago
I'm not seeing the issue here. As you say, let's talk about this at the individual level: picture yourself as a prehistoric pastoralist raising cattle. They eat plants you can't digest, and from them you get milk and meat. Everybody knows that you can't just drink the milk raw -- the lactose in there will really do a number on your digestive system -- but processed milk products like cheese make up a major part of your diet. ... Except that you can digest the lactose. You don't feel sick after drinking milk, because you have a mutation that breaks the normal mammalian mechanism for reducing lactase production in adulthood. Sounds nice, right? But maybe not something that'll bring a huge reproductive advantage to you and yours; more of a cool party trick to show off to your neighbors. And then one year there's not nearly enough rain. Famines have always been pretty common, alas, and here's another one. Now consider this: processing the milk so lactose-intolerant people can digest it loses about 40% of the calories. You can drink it straight because of your freaky mutant milk-drinking powers, and your neighbors can't. You get a lot more food at a time when people are dying from lack of food. Is this sounding like an evolutionary advantage? The sort of thing you might pass on to the kids you'll have because you didn't starve? The ability to digest lactose as an adult is potentially a really big deal if you happen to live in a culture that already uses processed milk products as a major source of calories.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Dairy products would not have made up a substantial portion of a regions diet until lactose tolerance had emerged. Lactose intolerance extends to all dairy products, not just milk. And again, you need lactating animals to produce consistent dairy products. Animals do not naturally lactate unless they're feeding their young. And animals also do not naturally produce the freakish amount of milk that we're able to extract now a days from millennia of artificial selection and, in the US at least, using a lifelong cocktail of all sorts of different drugs. To be clear, I do agree with you that in certain uncommon scenarios lactose tolerance could provide a tangible, though not enormous, advantage. And that's the problem. A different shaped beak for a bird entails a never-ending constant, and enormous, advantage. Lactose tolerance is something that's pretty irrelevant by comparison, yet it would become ubiquitous.
deleted 8y ago
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torstenvl 8y ago
In a purely random natural selection driven system, propagation relies on the success of a single mutated individual That is flatly incorrect. Whoever convinced you this is true has a fundamental misunderstanding of natural selection. Any time environmental pressures change such that a particular phenotypical expression leads to more reproductive success, that is natural selection. A mutation is utterly unnecessary.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  You have the context of what you're responding to right above you. The discussion is about mutations. How a single mutation would propagate in cases where mutations were entirely random as opposed to those where mutations were, in some way, less than random.

pjscott 8y ago

I'm not seeing the issue here. As you say, let's talk about this at the individual level: picture yourself as a prehistoric pastoralist raising cattle. They eat plants you can't digest, and from them you get milk and meat. Everybody knows that you can't just drink the milk raw -- the lactose in there will really do a number on your digestive system -- but processed milk products like cheese make up a major part of your diet. ... Except that you can digest the lactose. You don't feel sick after drinking milk, because you have a mutation that breaks the normal mammalian mechanism for reducing lactase production in adulthood. Sounds nice, right? But maybe not something that'll bring a huge reproductive advantage to you and yours; more of a cool party trick to show off to your neighbors. And then one year there's not nearly enough rain. Famines have always been pretty common, alas, and here's another one. Now consider this: processing the milk so lactose-intolerant people can digest it loses about 40% of the calories. You can drink it straight because of your freaky mutant milk-drinking powers, and your neighbors can't. You get a lot more food at a time when people are dying from lack of food. Is this sounding like an evolutionary advantage? The sort of thing you might pass on to the kids you'll have because you didn't starve? The ability to digest lactose as an adult is potentially a really big deal if you happen to live in a culture that already uses processed milk products as a major source of calories.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Dairy products would not have made up a substantial portion of a regions diet until lactose tolerance had emerged. Lactose intolerance extends to all dairy products, not just milk. And again, you need lactating animals to produce consistent dairy products. Animals do not naturally lactate unless they're feeding their young. And animals also do not naturally produce the freakish amount of milk that we're able to extract now a days from millennia of artificial selection and, in the US at least, using a lifelong cocktail of all sorts of different drugs. To be clear, I do agree with you that in certain uncommon scenarios lactose tolerance could provide a tangible, though not enormous, advantage. And that's the problem. A different shaped beak for a bird entails a never-ending constant, and enormous, advantage. Lactose tolerance is something that's pretty irrelevant by comparison, yet it would become ubiquitous.

deleted 8y ago

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torstenvl 8y ago

In a purely random natural selection driven system, propagation relies on the success of a single mutated individual That is flatly incorrect. Whoever convinced you this is true has a fundamental misunderstanding of natural selection. Any time environmental pressures change such that a particular phenotypical expression leads to more reproductive success, that is natural selection. A mutation is utterly unnecessary.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
You have the context of what you're responding to right above you. The discussion is about mutations. How a single mutation would propagate in cases where mutations were entirely random as opposed to those where mutations were, in some way, less than random.