Monkeys strong together
Over time, that population will get longer and longer necks until having a longer neck is not an advantage (the giraffes are taller than the trees) or becomes a disadvantage (their necks are too long to get blood up to the brain).Īnimals with helpful mutations are more fit, and are more likely to survive and have kids. Giraffes’ long necks allow them to reach a food source that few other animals in their environment can reach. The ones with the longest necks will do better than any short-necked giraffes. Not only will the long-necked giraffes have more kids, those kids will inherit the long-neck mutation and have longer necks too. By getting more food, that giraffe is more likely to survive and have more kids than its short-necked brethren. And since most animals are living right on the edge of survival, even a small boost helps.Ī giraffe with a slightly longer neck that can stretch just a little bit higher will be able to eat leaves that other giraffes can’t reach. This increase in fitness could be very small, but it gives that animal an advantage. Helpful mutations make animals more fit for their environment. In other words, does a genetic mutation make an animal more or less fit for its environment? When we think about mutations making new species, we need to think about fitness. A polar bear is more fit in the cold and a camel is more fit in the desert. Polar bears may be great in the Arctic, but in the desert they will lose out to a camel every time. “Fitness” in the evolutionary sense describes how well an animal does in a certain environment. When biologists talk about fitness, they’re not talking about how fast an animal can run or how many push-ups it can do. Instead of talking about health, I’m going to talk about “ fitness”. Mutations can also happen when DNA is exposed to certain chemicals or to the UV rays in sunlight.Īs you pointed out, most mutations don’t make species healthier, but I’m going to be a bit nit-picky. This process sometimes makes mistakes in the copies, and those mistakes are mutations. When animals have kids, they make copies of their DNA. First off, it’s important to know that mutations are pretty common.
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Of course the ability to drink milk didn’t make Europeans into a new species! But if they had stayed isolated and built up a bunch of other DNA differences, then they might have. Just like humans and chimpanzees, who drifted apart 6 million or so years ago. In the end, pretty much everyone in this area could drink milk as an adult. They had more children, who also had the mutation and also survived better. People with this mutation had better survival than people without it. For reasons we don’t understand, this was a game changer in places like northern Europe.
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A few people had it but, since no one was drinking milk into adulthood, it didn’t matter much either way.īut then people started to use milk from animals as food. Via Shutterstockįor most of our history, this mutation would be described as neutral – neither helpful nor harmful. Being able to digest milk as an adult is a relatively recently evolved trait in humans.