Explain how a lactose tolerance mutation would spread through a human population that herds cattle. Make sure to include the concepts of variation, selection, and inheritance in your explanation.

Question

1. Explain how a lactose tolerance mutation would spread through a human population that herds cattle. Make sure to include the concepts of variation, selection, and inheritance in your explanation.

Answer 1

Might not be timely as the post date of the question is 02/04/2021 and today in 08/19/2021...either way here it is:

There is variation within the DNA of this human population, meaning that some of the people has this lactose tolerance gene and some do not. So depending on the inheritance of this gene(ie. is it a dominant gene or recessive or sex-linked) and whether it confers some sort of advantage, which in this case it seems to confer an advantage as those individuals with the gene can tolerate the milk products better and derive nutrition, survive/thrive better than individuals with out this gene and finally reproduce more therefore being 'selected' more, meaning the environmental conditions (lactose rich diet of cattle herders) benefits(selects) for those individuals with the lactose tolerance gene.