The answer is apparently “because we’re actually able to eat it”
Fun fact: white people (specifically Northern European white people) have a genetic mutation that allows them to digest lactose even after weaning, which is abnormal for all mammals and also most humans. It’s theorized that because Northern Europe doesn’t get a lot of sun, an alternative source of vitamin D (like milk) would be a useful trait. It’s a very recent mutation that would only have happened after humans started domesticating animals like cows and goats.
oh no, my bizarre moment has come, cause lactose tolerance is actually A Thing I Know About because it’s played a fascinating role in human evolution for thousands of years. This chart displays some of the broad trends, but it’s giving near continental averages, which doesn’t showcase how this kind of thing really breaks down and some of the surprising exceptions.
Lactose tolerance is the majority trait for only a very few population groups: North Europeans (and therefore populations that draw heavily from that stock, such as America,) nomadic central Eurasians, and sub-Saharan pastoralist Africans, but that latter group is often overlooked. The vast majority of Africans cannot process lactose, but certain people groups whose lifestyles have revolved around cattle for thousands of years will have 80% and even approaching 100% lactose tolerance rates. They’d be spots of dark green amidst a sea of orange and burgundy on the above chart.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were almost entirely lactose intolerant, that is definitely the biological norm (and people groups who maintained that lifestyle, such as Native Americans, remained as such – along with groups who transitioned to sedentary agricultural lifestyles, but I’ll get into that). As such, lactose tolerance is an adaptive trait that only became prevalent in environments that exerted strong selective pressure for it. So, cows were domesticated some 10,000 odd years ago in the Middle East (and some have contended for an independent domestication event in Africa as well). In either case, cattle quickly spread across the continent and we know there was milking and cheese production at least 6,000 years ago in both the Nile and Mesopotamia. While cow meat would have been enjoyed by all, in agricultural societies milk and cheese would have been options, but hardly staples as there were plenty of other things to eat as well, and therefore there would have been no selective pressure for processing lactose. Also, sedentary societies had ways of processing milk and cheese that allowed lactose intolerant people to drink/eat dairy products. Fermenting milk or aging cheese breaks down lactose, making it a non issue once ingested. This is why fermented milk may seem utterly foul to many Westerners, but is extremely common in other parts of the world. But, fermentation and aging requires time, and the ability to store things in a single location for weeks or even months. Sedentary societies adapted the milk to fit their biology, but nomadic societies did the reverse.
There are still mobile pastoralist societies in Africa today, and there have been for thousands and thousands of years. For many of them, cows are not one of many dietary options, they are the single dietary staple around which their lifestyle revolves. Biologically, this means you gotta get with the program if you wanna survive. For most mobile tribes, fermentation and aging weren’t options, so there would have been strong selective pressure favoring those who could drink milk straight outta the cow, as they would have had an additional, highly nutritious food source available to them. Milk also allowed for a marked shortening of the weaning process, transitioning children from breastmilk to cow’s milk, which would again be advantageous for groups where both the men and women work and are always on the move. Over generations these populations specialized into essentially cow-based lifestyles, creating a survival niche highly advantageous to them, and fast forward thousands of years and there are groups in Africa with near ubiquitous lactose tolerance, while the rest of the continent (and the world really) is nearly entirely intolerant.
Many of these same factors would have influenced the central Eurasian populations, which is why Mongolians and other descendants of nomadic steppe peoples are largely lactose tolerant, as mare’s milk would have been a dietary staple (though they also developed efficient ways to ferment it).
North Europeans developed lactose tolerance in response to deficiencies in certain nutrients. The northern climate limited Vitamin D production, and the agricultural products available to them were often low on calcium and protein, and so dairy farming developed alongside agriculture to create a more rounded diet (and this was limited to Northern Europeans, as Mediterranean peoples such as the Romans wrote about their great confusion at the northern barbarians’ ability to drink fresh milk)
And I promise all of this is fascinating because the ability to process lactose evolved independently in several different population groups and in response to different factors: lifestyles revolving around cows, lifestyles revolving around horses, deficiencies in climate and agriculture. Besides providing insight into human history and biology, lactose tolerance is also a great example of convergent evolution, where different genetic populations in different environments produce similar results.
And uh, that’s my rant about the role of milk and lactose tolerance in human evolution.
Yeah when I see versions of this going around without the Mongolian peoples I quietly whisper “noooooo” but not loudly enough to write a frothing response, because yes, lots of cultures drink fermented milk, and many Mongolian people eat cheese.
here are some bootiful Mongolian cheeses made from horse and reindeer milk:
There is a huge tendency to accidentally go all “Guns Germs and Steel” with discussion of lactose tolerance and human evolution because, well… okay, we just have to be careful because discussions often shake out to “Europeans colonized and are politically dominant cos of Quirky White People Biology!” and we gotta be careful with that, okay? YES, getting reliable/storable/portable protein sources from milk and cheese - which don’t require hunting and danger to collect, and don’t require killing the animal - makes it a lot easier to live a subsistence lifestyle, and if you have that security of protein, it’s a lot easier to focus on non-subsistence labor, etc etc. But milk is not a strictly European thing, and colonization is not an inevitable result of drinking milk.
…. Okay, to be fair, the Mongolian people drink a huge amount of milk and held the LARGEST LAND EMPIRE IN HISTORY.
BUT. THAT WAS… NOT BECAUSE OF MILK OR CHEESE CONSUMPTION.
ANYWAY lactose tolerance can be found in individuals even if you are from a heritage that does not traditionally have it, since lactose tolerance has some epigenetic factors in addition to genetic factors, and there are differences between primary, secondary, congenital, and developmental lactase deficiencies.*
For example, secondary lactose intolerance is where an adult of milk-drinking-European descent loses the ability to drink milk as an adult. This is because they have celiac disease, or an autoimmune disorder, or a change in their gut bacteria, or chemotherapy, or whatever - but now they can’t drink milk. “But they have the magical lactase gene with the distinctive nucleotide polymorphism that leads to it normally staying turned on!” TOO BAD. EPIGENETICS WALKED IN, TURNED THE GENE OFF, AND WALKED OUT. NO MORE LACTASE PERSISTENCE FOR YOU, BECAUSE FUCK YOU. YESTERDAY’S PERFORMANCE IS NO INDICATOR OF TOMORROW’S RESULTS. YOUR GENES AREN’T SET IN STONE AND THEY WON’T SAVE YOU.
You can also demonstrate secondary lactose intolerance if you stop drinking milk for a long time as an adult, and then drink milk and get a tummy ache. EPIGENETICS. AND ALSO YOUR GUT FLORA ARE PROBABLY REALLY CONFUSED.
Human children are generally lactose tolerant, which is important because we are mammals, and children when they stop drinking breastmilk they lose this tolerance … unless you shove another source of lactose into their faces. People have suspected this since the 1970s because one can’t help but notice that if one is a European person and adopts an Asian or African child, the child often adapts to the household diet; and we now know that while there is just one gene that codes for lactase, there are lots of variants and environmental pressures that lead to lactase persistence. If you keep giving a kid milk for its childhood, it will frequently keep its ability to digest lactase because it’s still using it, so the gene stays turned on.**
Also, just to be safe, everyone should stop referring to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, all right? It’s 2016, it’s not funny, it’s not clever, and cheese is Very Serious.
But it doesn’t naturally lead to world domination. And epigenetics are a thing.
* Lactose (with its -ose ending) is the sugar found in milk. Sugars end in -ose, so now you know that glucose, sucrose, fructose etc are all sugars. Lactase (with its -ase ending) is the enzyme that digests lactose. Enzymes end in -ase, so you get helicase, ribonuclease, etc. The gene that codes for lactase production is, simplistically, the lactase gene. Lactose intolerance is caused by the lactase gene turning off. And since the default state of the lactase gene in mammals should actually be “off,” then “lactose intolerance” is less of a correct term than “lactase persistence”.
** Don’t do this if they have a milk allergy or lactose intolerance.
I’m writing this in Montana, location of the Little Bighorn battlefield (which is why I’m here, no offense to the city of Billings, which is very nice). The Little Bighorn, of course, is the place where an experienced guide said to General Custer, “that’s the biggest Indian village I’ve ever seen,” to which Custer replied, “great, let’s split up and go in three different directions.”
Spoiler alert: didn’t turn out real well (for his side, anyway)
But that was a simpler time, back when saying dumb things could actually have real consequences. This no longer appears to be true.
Well, shut up then and let me finish, Mr. Bold Print.
Fine.
Fine.
What the bill did was create an exception to the doctrine of state sovereign immunity, which (generally speaking) means you can’t sue a foreign state in a U.S. court unless it did something to you here in the U.S. If you’re on safari and Vladimir Putin shoots off your hairpiece, for example, you might be able to sue Russia for that in Zimbabwe (or wherever it happened) or maybe in Russia (ha, is joke) but you can’t force it to defend in a U.S. court. We give other countries immunity not because we love them but because we don’t want their citizens suing the U.S. in their courts for whatever the U.S. might do around the globe. It’s called reciprocity, and the concern is that if we start making exceptions then other countries will too. (This excellent explainer at Vox has more details.)
Supporters of JASTA say, though, that people should be able to sue state sponsors of terrorism, and everybody knows the alleged sponsor in question here is Saudi Arabia. But there’s already an exception for suits alleging injuries caused by terrorism, as long as the foreign state has been officially designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, and—oops! Saudi Arabia is not on that list for reasons known as “oil.” So JASTA adds another exception, this one for injuries caused in the U.S. by terrorism and an act of a state or its officials anywhere in the world. It then goes even further by authorizing “aiding and abetting” liability (a notoriously vague concept) for anybody who helps or conspires with the terrorist. And of course terrorism = bad, but the problem is that other countries can define “terrorism” however they want, and the broader we make the exception the more likely they are to reciprocate.
But you don’t have to take my word for it on this one. Just read this letter that 28 senators sent to the bill’s bipartisan sponsors after the override, pleading with them to do something about the risk that the new law would have the “potential unintended consequences” of subjecting the U.S. to private lawsuits in foreign courts, and asking them to help fix it. They—
Excuse me.
… Yes?
You said the Senate voted 97-1 to override.
Yes.
So these 28 senators—
—had all just voted in favor of the bill they were now complaining about, yes.
McConnell didn’t sign the letter, as far as I can tell, but he did blame the president for this terrible bill he had just voted to pass. “I hate to blame everything on him, and I don’t,” McConnell said, although neither of those things are true. “But,” he continued, “it would have been helpful had we had a discussion about this much earlier than last week,” he continued, meaning that the White House should have alerted Congress to the potential problem. (It did, repeatedly.) This meant that “[n]obody [in Congress] really had focused on the potential downside in terms of our international relationships,” McConnell said, accusing Obama of “dropping the ball.”
The short version, of course, is that everybody knew this was a bad idea but nobody wanted to vote “against” 9/11 families in an election year. So everybody voted for it and then immediately started looking for a way to undo what they had just done. A truly noble effort all around.
It's been a while since I've fallen down the rabbit hole of a single person's portfolio, but this here is the guy. To say Art Director Tatsuya Tanaka's imagination is fertile is an understatement, and his attention to detail borders on fanatical.
Whereas the designers among us might touch an object and become fixated on a parting line, a unique joinery method or a particularly artful weld, Tanaka sees entire worlds in the tiniest of details, and sets up miniatures to help us see what he sees. Tennis ball seams are biking trails;
a protractor, a blackjack table;
an F1 pit stop where the "F" stands for "Footwear;"
a stack of magazines become nighttime snack stands in Hong Kong.
My favorites are the ones that specifically reference life in Tanaka's home country of Japan. A dishwashing sponge becomes the natural carpet of a hanami (cherry blossom bloomtime picnic);
a tameshigiri practioner produces penne;
a circuit board becomes a partially harvested rice paddy;
Muji notebooks become a cityscape;
Pocky become lighsabers;
a dumpling skin becomes a Sumo ring;
high heels become the entrance to a Tokyo train station.
Which is not to say the non-Japanese-specific ones are not also fascinating.
Most amazing of all is how prolific Tanaka is. Since April of 2011 he has released one new photo a day, every day, in a calendar format. Be careful if you're at work--you can spend hours clicking through his set-ups.
Hillary Clinton spoke at an African American church in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sunday, in a visit delayed a week by protests over the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott. “Too many African American families have been in the same tragic situation that the Scott family has found themselves,” Clinton said, going on to also lament the deaths of police officers on the job. The closest Clinton got to electoral politics was late in the speech:
Now, there are some out there who see this as a moment to command the flames of resentment and division. Who want to exploit people's fears, even though it means tearing our nation even further apart. They say that all of our problems will be solved simply by more ‘law and order.’ As if the systemic racism plaguing our country doesn't exist. Now, of course we need safe neighborhoods, no one is against that. Of course, we need communities that are free from the epidemic of gun violence, of course we need that. But we also need justice and dignity and equality, and we can have both. This is not an either-or question for America.
It’s not real difficult to read between those lines. But far more of the speech was dedicated to the impact police violence has on communities and, in particular, children. Clinton spoke about—and then welcomed and hugged—nine-year-old Zianna Oliphant, whose emotional speech to the Charlotte city council went viral last week.
I'm a grandmother, and like every grandmother I worry about the safety and security of my grandchildren, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers. They have different, and deeper fears about the world that their grandchildren face. It makes my heart ache, when kids like Zianna, are going through this and trying to make sense of the absolutely senseless. I know how I would feel. I wouldn't be able to stand it if my grandchildren had to be scared and worried the way too many children across our country feel right now. But because my grandchildren are white, because they are the grandchildren of a former president and secretary of state, let's be honest here – they won't face the kind of fear that we heard from the young children testifying before the city council.
You know, every child deserves the same sense of security, every child deserves the same hope. They should not be facing fear, they should be learning and growing, imagining who they can be, and what their contributions to our country could be as well. We've got to take action, we've got to start now, not tomorrow, not next year, now. We know we can't solve all these problems over night, which means we don't have a moment to lose.
Clinton also cited specific policies like Rep. Jim Clyburn’s “plan to put 10 percent of our federal funds into 20 percent of the communities that have generational poverty for 30 years or more,” and called for an end to the school-to-prison pipeline, investment in education, training police in de-escalation, gun law reforms, and “fix[ing] a system where too many black parents are taken from their kids and imprisoned for minor offenses.”
Clint Barton would take 10 bullets and keep shooting until he finished a mission but if he got a paper cut he would probably complain about it for 3 hours to Natasha
In a move that blatantly disregards our unspoken agreement to never think about the Olympics when they aren’t taking place, President Barack Obama welcomed a slew of U.S. Olympians to the White House on Thursday, including the gold-medal-winning women’s U.S. gymnastics team.
And since Obama is a funny guy, he attempted to get into the splits with the team in front of the White House photographer. At least, that’s what the caption says. Really, Obama slightly bent at the knees and said, “Caption the photo so it says I tried to do the splits.” He’s barely lunging but whatever. How can we ever trust him again?
The White House welcomed Paralympians as well, although there were some big-name absences at the event.
This is the last group of Olympians the Obamas will host at the White House, as the president noted in his speech to the group.
Among the athletes were Simone Biles, Michael Phelps and Aly Raisman. Gabby Douglas, who underwent surgery to remove her wisdom teeth earlier this week, did not attend. Swimmer Ryan Lochte was banned from the event.
First, could Douglas not have had her wisdom teeth yanked at literally any other time? I get not wanting to make a public appearance when your jaw is all swollen but you skipped a White House visit. Get it done a week earlier or a week later.
Second, Lochte being banned from the White House is great. I like to think he didn’t know he was banned and tried to attend anyway, only he was standing alone outside Monticello wondering where everyone was.
Getty Image
Third, yeah, the Obamas can’t host Olympians at the White House ever again, but why not at their house? You’re telling me if they invited gold-medal winners to their private residence, they wouldn’t come? Spring for some catering, get a bouncy house in your backyard and create some viral content when the gymnasts go wild in that thing.
Then again, what if Michelle runs and wins? That would mean four to eight more years of the Obamas pretending to do splits in front of White House photographers.
I feel like I’ve kind of lost the point of this story. American Olympians and Paralympians were at the White House. They had fun. Thanks for reading.
Also, wearing sweaters in my house means I have a 97.5% chance of a cat being draped over my shoulder. I'd like to see death try to tangle with Super ButtButt.
when listening to music sometimes makes it impossible to focus and sometimes it’s the only way you can focus and it’s hard to predict when it will be which
spent a few nights at an organic farm Airbnb run by a great hippie couple. husband was pointing out the electrical cow fence to us, and said a certain section had lost power for some reason, so it was operating on “the honor system.” his wife was like, “I don’t think cattle know what that is,” and he paused and stroked his grizzled beard thoughtfully, then turned to her and shouted, “ARE YOU SAYING MY COWS HAVE NO HONOR”
they were also telling us about the time there was a big storm that knocked down the entire fence. to keep the cattle from finding out and roaming off, they had to keep them “real happy,” just bringing them up on the hill with the best grass and feeding them the best treats and singing nicely to them so the cows were just chill enough to lay down and be spoiled and never knew the fence was out
I just don’t feel comfortable posting the entire song on YouTube,
so the second chorus is missing from this video. Hence the abrupt transition in
the middle.
This is dedicated to my sister and niece, the wicked girls
of my life.
pic.twitter.com/kxyB3mx6RP
