Recent evolution

Regarding the absence of wisdom teeth and smaller jaws being attributed to the cooking and processing of our food [ FT401:23]: hasn’t this been going on for millennia? I wonder if the ‘recent’ trend could be connected to the use of the knife and fork. This has enabled cultures that use them to chew on ‘bite-sized’ chunks, which has altered our facial appearance by dispensing with the need to develop strong jaw muscles. Perhaps wisdom teeth then became more of a liability – becoming impacted – than an advantage, and natural selection operated accordingly.

I wonder if the Chinese, for example, have a similar or greater lack of wisdom teeth, having started using chopsticks way before ‘the West’ adopted the knife and fork. Regarding the additional bones and abnormal connections mentioned, I wonder if it is partly a case of advances in medical science making these anomalies apparent, and partly a case of these anomalies not needing to be selected out in modern society.

I have difficulty understanding how natural selection could account for the retention of the median artery, usually only seen in unborn babies. Are adults with this artery far more successful than us ‘ordinary’ people, and is it an inherited characteristic? Even if the answer is yes to both questions, I cannot see how these triple-arteried “supermen” (and women) could become common in only 80 years. Couldn’t there be other, possibly environmental, factors involved?

According to the report, “humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any point in the past 250 years”. Are we really evolving at a rate that could even be noticed over 250 years? For example, in Western cultures it is recognised that people are taller on average than historically, but I’ve always believed this to be attributed to diet and other cultural factors. Similarly, the change in facial appearance with the advent of the knife and fork is simply due to us having less muscular jaws.

Dave Miles

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