The most recent version of a gene called CLTCL1, involved in regulating blood-sugar levels, began to spread when humans started farming cereals
to assume that the long march of evolution has halted in modern man—that the safe, disease-free lives people now lead mean natural selection no longer operates on much of. It is an attractive idea. Frances Brodsky of University College, London and her colleagues, however, beg to differ. A paper they have just published inDr Brodsky and her team study proteins called clathrins.
Dr Brodsky suspects this is no coincidence. A cereal-based diet is far richer in carbohydrates than the diet of a hunter-gatherer. Once digested, those carbs will end up as glucose in the bloodstream. An inability to control high blood sugar is known as diabetes. And diabetes can be fatal. So a better way of removing glucose from the blood and into storage cells will be favoured by natural selection.
There is, in fact, already one known example of something similar having happened—the persistence into adulthood of the ability to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk. Human children produce an enzyme, lactase, that lets them do this. Usually, this capacity is lost in adults. But populations descended from those that domesticated milk-producing animals such as goats and cattle often retain lactose-digestion into adulthood.
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