What about the first person to look at a lobster and wonder what that would taste like?
hmmm… ok, so… I started to read most of these posts…
then past, say… the 20th one my eyes glazed over…
(seems you were treading the same ground anywaze…)
now… the following is quite logical…
(1) in desperation to find food sources on the plains, early man would try grinding up all sorts of vegetables for a food source… the most plentiful on the plains of course, were the wheat grasses… so, harvesting a few stalks, ground them up and you have flour…
(so yes… we DID try eating the grass…)
to get enough of this flour to feed your “tribe”, you would need to tend the same patch of ground all year round… (or at least, bring in a team of your fellow tribesmen to harvest the fields same time each year…) thus, our nomadic tribes became domesticated villagers…
(same thing with the domestication of animal herds…)
flour on it’s own is pretty much useless as food…
but, mix it with water… and you have a basic dough…
mixed with other ingredients and you have a flavoured dough…
if you then cook all of this up, you have anything from unleavened bread to crackers / biscuits… etc…
nothing too hard to figure out…
now… leavened bread, (bread with yeast) was probably discovered / invented at about the same time as we discovered how to make beer / wine…
wine was originally “grape juice”, which… left in the hot summer sun… would then get fermented by what’ever bacteria was around… people drinking this, would discover a “euphoric” (ie: DRUNKEN) effect… and would then, attempt to find ways to duplicate this effect…
also nothing too hard to figure out…
(2) eggs is really a no-brainer… Humans are essentially omnivores… and will eat ANYTHING given the chance… now, there IS a certain survivalist strain to this… we will eat ANYTHING that wont get us KILLED in the process…
(hence… who would be CRAZY enough to sneak up to a wild herd of cattle to suckle some milk?? ANYONE?? huh? huuuh!?)
eggs can be a pretty easy meal… simply find a nest, scare off all the birds, then… raid the nest for some eggy goodness…
no real intelligence required, since… eating eggs is not something terribly unique to the human species…
now, like the harvesting of wheat… we eventually found ways to domesticate the chicken… and in doing so, we had a safe regular source of eggs…
so… nothing too hard to figure out their either…
now, what gets me puzzled is the whole “COWS MILK” thing…
it’s logical to think cows are a good source of MEAT… I mean, that’s the basic reason we domesticated them I would think…
but why would we NEED the milk?
we’ve got the meat… we’ve got the harvested wheat, we’ve got the eggs… I really don’t think we’d be crazy enough to live anywhere too far from a good source of water (a lake / river… etc)
so really, we’ve got a lot’ve food as it is…
baby’s drink milk… yes…
but it’s HUMAN milk…
but, we adults don’t need milk do we?
I mean… it’s not needed for our desperate survival…?
WHAT DEMENTED LINE of thinking would cause us… to DRINK THE MILK… not from our own species (which only babies need anyway… and get from their mothers…) BUT, to actually CONSIDER MILKING ANOTHER ANIMAL?? for drinking???
it’s like being crazy enough to drink cat’s urine…
I mean, you guys might think… “suuuure… some drunken idiot’s gonna try it…” but you’re thinking by modern standards of random stupidity…
random stupidity isn’t a good survival trait… (well, not back then anywaze…)
out’ve all the “basic” foodstuffs we have… cow’s milk seems the strangest of them all… the one that makes LEAST logical sense…
SO… WHY DRINK COWS MILK??
P.S. I’m not saying this as a whole anti cows milk campaign or anything… I actually like milk, I have it with my coffee… I have it with a LOT of things… I’m lactose tolerant… BUT, WHY / HOW would we in normal day to day survival rational feel the need to DISCOVER it? that’s the puzzler…
More chances of expressing itself, yes, but (barring selection effects) it’s no more likely to be passed on. In fact, tolerant adults have no guarantee of having tolerant children: Look at your third case, Ti and Ti. There’s a 1 in 4 chance of them having an ii child. If it were a recessive trait, then this would not be true: Parents who express a recessive trait are guaranteed to have a child who expresses that trait. It’s a common misconception, but “dominant trait” does not mean “if I’m lactose tolerant, then all my children will be lactose tolerant too”.
The only difference between dominant and recessive traits being passed on in the long run is that it’s much easier to weed out a bad dominant trait than a bad recessive trait. Unless there’s some situation where lactose tolerance is disadvantageous, though, that’s not relevant here.
Yes, and a 3 in 4 chance of their child being tolerant.
I think I understand your point, which can only be that a rare mutation will not spread through a population because it will be swamped by the overwhelmingly omnipresent unmutated gene, even if it is recessive.
But I specifically stated that in this instance there are selection pressures for this dominant gene. And once such a gene manifests itself in a population to any extent, it will quickly spread through the population precisely because it is dominant.
Since your objection doesn’t apply to the specific case being talked about, I still say that it is technically true and mostly irrelevant.
If your point is anything other than what I think it is, then I’m just plain baffled.