Lactose Intolerance By Briana Pobiner

For Darwin Day, I went to see evolutionary anthropologist Briana Pobiner for her talk on human evolution and the evidence from diet, disease, and diversity. Throughout her speech, I found some things she said to be interesting; others to be quite surprising. I also analyzed what Pobiner discussed and found value in her evidence. To begin, I found the lactose intolerance part of the talk to be very interesting. I found out for the first time ever that only 35% of adults - out of the population of seven billion people - can drink milk. I didn’t realize that the number was so low or so drastic. Pobiner used lactose intolerance as an example of her four step plan for building an evolutionary explanation; this included variation, inheritance, selection, and adaption. She explained why some regions have more lactose intolerance than others and displayed the distribution of people through the form of a map. With this introduction, the evolution of lactose was explained. Pobiner pointed out that a seven thousand year old pottery sieve that was used to make cheese was founded. So, using this sample, it can be estimated that milk has been used for that long, maybe even longer. It was thought that the intolerance of lactose to have begun only about five thousand years ago. This was discovered from ancient

I learned significantly a lot more than I would have previously. The example of lactose intolerance was very interesting; it really did give prime reasoning to human adaption. The concept of current human evolution was surprising to me; it is shown through evidence that I would not have connected to before. I found value in the talk by how well it relates to real life events and how these examples give confirmation to this theory. Pobiner left the audience with the indecisive question that left me wondering: is this adjusting or adapting? Only the future will