probiotics Often acquired tastes are acquired genes: Probiotics and prebiotics 4:00 AM 0 Gut flora is found in many areas of our digestive tract, particularly in the colon. Whenever we eat anything we feed the microbes that mak...
Zahavian traits Could we have evolved traits that are detrimental to our survival? 5:58 AM 0 Let us assume that we collected data on the presence or absence of a trait (e.g., propensity toward risky behavior) in a population of in...
plaque Familial hypercholesteromia: Why rely on cholesterol levels when more direct measures are available? 4:00 AM 0 There are two forms of familial hypercholesteromia (FH), namely heterozygous and homozygous FH. In heterozygous FH only one copy of the gene...
telomere How come evolution hasn’t made us immortal? Death, like sex, helps animal populations avoid extinction 6:51 AM 0 Genes do not evolve, nor do traits that are coded for our genes. We say that they evolve to facilitate discourse, which is alright. Populati...
statistics Human traits are distributed along bell curves: You need to know yourself, and HCE can help 5:40 AM 0 Most human traits (e.g., body fat percentage, blood pressure, propensity toward depression) are influenced by our genes; some more than othe...
Zahavian traits The evolution of costly traits: Competing for women can be unhealthy for men 7:47 AM 0 There are human traits that evolved in spite of being survival handicaps. These counterintuitive traits are often called costly traits, or Z...
research Pretty faces are average faces: Genetic diversity and health 5:58 AM 0 Many people think that the prettiest faces are those with very unique features. Generally that is not true. Pretty faces are average faces. ...
research Genetic clustering of metabolic disorders: Meet your relatives 3:20 PM 0 As noted in this post , it is possible for a food-related trait to evolve to fixation in an entire population in as little as 396 years; not...
vegetarian Lucy was a vegetarian and sapiens an omnivore: Plant foods as natural supplements 3:28 PM 0 Early hominid ancestors like the Australopithecines (e.g., Lucy ) were likely strict vegetarians. Meat consumption seems to have occurred at...
Washington Applied evolutionary thinking: Darwin meets Washington 6:44 AM 0 Charles Darwin, perhaps one of the greatest scholars of all time, thought about his theory of mutation, inheritance, and selection of biolog...
nutrition How long does it take for a food-related trait to evolve? 10:56 AM 0 Often in discussions about Paleolithic nutrition, and books on the subject, we see speculations about how long it would take for a populatio...