> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How Natural Selection Made You... You - URL: https://goodoil.news/how-natural-selection-made-you-you/ - Published: 2026-10-17T20:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-17T19:59:59.000Z - Description: Recent landmarks in human evolution are there to see in many of us. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: History, Science It’s bizarre that the notion of evolution by means of natural selection can still be disputed in some circles, when the evidence for it is not just all around us, it’s literally written in our own bodies, in a concatenation of As, Cs, Gs and Ts. These letters represent the nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine) that form DNA, grouped together in the blocks called genes. When changes occur in this code, it’s called a mutation. Popular culture has fostered the idea that mutations are always harmful, but this is completely false. Some mutations are very beneficial: so much so that they enable an individual to reproduce with more success than others. When this happens, the mutation becomes more common, ultimately changing entire populations. Thanks to advances in genetic science, we can now pinpoint just where and when a particular mutation entered the population (the sort of science that allows an Ancestry DNA test to pinpoint where the ancestors whose genes ended up in *you* came from). Here’s just a few of the mutations that changed modern humans and how they spread (spoiler: because the individuals with the mutation got a lot luckier than the ones without it). Let us begin our genealogical tour not with the grand theatricality of a royal procession, but rather in the fragrant, albeit somewhat congested, accommodations of Northern China during the chill of 38,000 BC. Picture, if you will, a community of our distant forebears huddled together against the frost, deriving what little solace they might from a central hearth fed by animal hides and the durable architecture of mammoth bones. The atmosphere is, by any modern metric, an absolute olfactory disaster, a rich, compounding tapestry of unwashed bodies, greasy furs, wood smoke and the heavy perspiration of 40 souls for whom soap is a science fiction invention 36,000 years in the future. Yet, within this fug of prehistoric BO, there exists a singular protagonist who remains entirely impervious to the sensory assault. > [You carry a mutation](https://youtu.be/3jDWDA4FQZ8?si=toIL8dy8cByWPVxS&ref=goodoil.news) on the ABCC11 gene, a single letter swap in your DNA that shuts down the proteins your sweat glands would normally secrete. You produce no body odor, and your ear wax is dry and flaky instead of wet and sticky. It is a minor genetic tweak, yet it alters the geopolitical landscape of the cave entirely. While your peers exude the robust bouquet of the Pleistocene hunter, you stand amidst them like an oasis of neutrality. The local maidens, naturally discerning creatures despite their lack of formal education, find themselves inexplicably drawn toward your corner of the dwelling. When a particular young lady of your acquaintance leans in close and observes that you smell of absolute nothingness, history is quietly forged. You are, in essence, the progenitor of the modern antiperspirant demographic, proving definitively that sometimes the greatest evolutionary advantage is simply not offending the nostrils of the opposite sex. It also explains why groups like the Chinese and Japanese tend to find others a bit malodorous. Moving forward – or rather, stepping back some two hundred millennia onto the sun-scorched expanse of the East African savannah – we encounter a different sort of survival strategy altogether. Here, the great enemy is not the cold, but the merciless tyranny of a punishing dry season. Food is scarcer than an honest politician and the tribe’s collective ribs are beginning to resemble a xylophone. Your hunting party has spent the better part of daylight tracking a wounded antelope, trudging through the tall grasses until your bare feet feel as though they are lined with lead. The beast slows, limping toward a rocky defile from where there is no dignified exit. While your companions hesitate, paralysed by a sensible calculation of their remaining caloric reserves, you take decisive action. > Tonight, your group eats because of you. And when you walk back into camp with meat over your shoulders, every pair of eyes turns your way. You carry what geneticists would subsequently designate as the ACTN3 gene, the foundational architecture of sprinting prowess. It is a fascinating quirk of biological engineering that over a billion and a half people walking the earth today have jettisoned this very gene, having traded raw acceleration for metabolic efficiency during their long northward migration. But upon the baking plains of antiquity, the man who could outrun an antelope in the short burst it took to bring it down was not merely well-fed: he was the undisputed architect of the evening’s social hierarchy. He who brings home the meat gets more say in where to hide the sausage. Natural selection favours the providers. As humanity traded the spear for the plough, the evolutionary pressures shifted once more. Transport ourselves to the island of Crete in the idyllic year of 7,000 BC. Following an extraordinarily generous harvest of wheat, lentils and roasted goat, your village has engaged in a feast of biblical proportions. Most reasonable individuals reach a point of satiety where the mere contemplation of additional nourishment induces mild nausea. You, however, are governed by a different internal compass. > You carry the A variant of the FTO gene, the most common obesity-related gene in the human genome. It increases your levels of ghrelin, the hunger hormone. So even after a full meal, your brain keeps whispering more. While your neighbours push their wooden trenchers away with contented sighs, you happily dispatch another roasted goat, your physiological machinery converting every surplus molecule of fat with the ruthless efficiency of a Swiss accountant. To the aesthetic sensibilities of the local maidens, your silhouette is perhaps less than fashionable – they cast their adoring glances toward the lean, sinewy fishermen and the lithe tillers of the soil. But nature, in her cynical wisdom, plays a long game: when the inevitable drought arrives and the crops wither into dust, those slender, enviable Adonises begin to perish with alarming rapidity. You, meanwhile, draw serenely upon your formidable metabolic reserves, subsisting for months on little more than stubbornness and stored triglycerides. When the rains finally return, you emerge from the lean times somewhat diminished in circumference, but decidedly alive. Once again, the survival of the species belongs not to the aesthetically optimised, but to those who treated the village larder as a personal challenge. Consider next the curious case of ocular pigmentation, unfolding against the rugged backdrop of Southern Italy in 15,000 BC. Up until this juncture in human history, the gene pool possessed all the chromatic variety of a freshly turned furrow – every child emerged into the light equipped with eyes the colour of rich, dependable mud. Then, to everyone’s surprise, out popped a single baby with a gaze as cerulean as the Mediterranean. > You carry a mutation in the HERC2 gene, a switch that turned off the pigment your eyes were supposed to have. But nobody thinks you’re special in a good way. In a small, superstitious tribe where standing out from the crowd is chiefly a method for getting oneself nominated for hazardous duty, your sky-coloured optics are viewed with deep suspicion. You do not fell beasts with greater economy, nor do you navigate the underbrush with superior stealth. You are simply regarded as a peculiar domestic anomaly – a walking conversation piece of questionable utility. Yet, evolution cares little for the local gossip. A perceptive young woman, looking past the tribal consensus of weirdness, finds herself transfixed by your icy gaze. Seventeen millennia down the line, some three hundred million descendants will blink their way through modern life bearing your exact genetic signature. If girls cannot resist your stare, it is quite capable of carrying a lineage across the centuries. Further north, amidst the damp, cheerless gales of what would eventually become Scotland, another genomic drama was quietly playing out. Your ancestors were the intrepid wanderers who pushed past the sensible borders of the known world, ultimately stranding themselves upon a damp rock where the sun deigns to shine for perhaps 20 minutes per annum. The results are predictably grim: deprived of vitamin D, the local juveniles are universally bow-legged, the adults shamble about with the structural integrity of waterlogged timber and any wound is a crippling, prolonged ordeal. Into this miserable meteorological landscape steps the bearer of a rather remarkable recessive inheritance. > Your skin is pale and your hair bright red. You look like a mistake, which you are in a way. But every weak ray of winter sun that touches your skin passes straight through and gets converted into vitamin D, the molecule that keeps bones hard, immunity sharp, and wounds closing. While your swarthier companions succumb to the perpetual gloom, their bones softening and their spirits flagging, you stride across the heather with hair the colour of the rising sun and skin that treats sunlight like precious bullion. The very mutation that marks you out as an eccentric misfit in the demographic ledger ensures your biological triumph. In a cursed land where the sun don’t shine, the ginger champion stands supreme. Yet nature’s experiments are rarely without their tragic ironies, as illustrated in the forested river basins of West Central Africa around 1,000 BC. The transition from nomadic foraging to settled agriculture brought undeniable blessings: granaries filled to bursting and villages anchored in permanence. Regrettably, it also introduced the stagnant puddle and, with it, the unsparing scourge of tropical fever. > You carry one copy of a mutation on the HBB gene, just one. It changes the shape of some of your red blood cells. When the parasite enters your blood, your misshapen cells kill it before it can take hold. You glide through the epidemic unscathed, a monument to genetic resilience, passing your protective talisman down to a robust brood of children. But genetics is a fickle croupier and, when the dice are rolled for the next generation, one of your children inherits the double dose: a matching set of mutations from both parents. What protects in moderation destroys in excess. He or she survives the fever only to perish of the cure, a stark and sobering reminder that the machinery of selection operates without sentimentality or mercy. Finally, we find ourselves strolling through the charming canals of mid-19th-century Netherlands, an era when the average gentleman stood a modest five feet and five inches tall, gazing up with mild irritation at their towering American contemporaries. You, however, are a statistical rebel. > You carry a handful of gene variants, including one on the HMGA2 gene that have pushed your height above the rest. At five feet and eight inches, you tower over the village dance floor like a mammalian monolith. When you approach the most sought-after young lady in the parish, a man of standard Dutch altitude has already been politely rebuffed and sent back to drown his sorrows with a Heineken or three. Your superior stature tips the romantic scales entirely in your favour. And keeps tipping it: now the Dutch are among the tallest people in the world. The history of life on this planet is written by those who simply managed to reach a little higher than the rest. Thus, we are left to ponder the restless, ceaseless alchemy of our own chromosomes. The genomic code is not a dusty museum exhibit locked away in some academic archive – it is a living, breathing ledger that continues to be written, edited, and occasionally discarded with every generation that walks the earth. You carry the echoes of these ancient lottery winners within your own cells right now, even if you remain entirely oblivious as to whether your particular combination is destined for triumph or oblivion. All you can do is endeavour to contribute a reasonably sturdy variant or two to the ongoing experiment. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**