Unknown Story
Текст на Статията
- A Brief Comic on Evolution: An Everyday Genetic Mutation
- Food is currently scarce in the jungle. However, this ape has stumbled upon some fruit that has fallen off the tree and he decides to eat it all.
- Little did the ape know, but the fruit he ate had been fermenting in the sun and, as the fruit rotted, it produced ethanol. After eating it all, the ape was drunk.
- Because the fallen fruit was so easily accessible, many of the apes began to eat it. However, some apes were far less susceptible to the effects of the ethanol than others. These apes had a mutation in their stomach enzymes which allowed them eat the fallen fruit and reap the nutritional benefits with a far smaller toxic effect from the ethanol.
- The apes who were able to consume the fallen fruit were healthier, as they had more access to nutrition.Those who were healthy mated with each other and continued to pass down this mutation to their offspring; a process known as natural selection.Over millions of years, apes became more and more adapted to the consumption of ethanol. Every human today possesses this genetic mutation.
- While it is obvious that ethanol metabolism is not the most significant aspect that drove ecological selection within ape populations, it did give a select few apes an upper-hand on others in the population in their ability to obtain nutrition. Today, we can thank our very distant primate ancestors for passing down this mutation and giving us our ability to consume alcohol without dire effects.
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