ANTH 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Lactase Persistence, James Ussher, James Hutton
3 May 2016
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Document Summary
Humans are far from perfect, biologically speaking - we are really just a bunch of quick fixes. Lactose tolerance is a recent example of evolution. As children mature, the ability to produce lactase (the protein that digests lactose) is switched off for about of the world"s population. Lactose tolerance in adulthood may be uniquely human. The 35% of the world"s adults who are lactose tolerant primarily have european ancestry. The scientific framework relies on the fact that things can be observed, measured, and analyzed. First basic principle of science is that there is a real and knowable universe. The second and third principles are that the universe operates according to understandable laws, and that these laws are unchanging. A hypothesis must be testable - there must be some way to collect and analyze data to either support or reject the hypothesis. Hypothesis: a possible explanation that may be tested using scientific method.
