In 2018, neo-Nazis in America introduced a new way of showing off their supposed racial superiority: they filmed themselves ‘chugging milk’ – that is, gulping down cow’s milk with their shirts off in a ridiculous attempt to demonstrate their genetically encoded capacity to process lactose, a sugar in milk that cannot be digested by the majority of humans after weaning, apart from Europeans. The gene mutations that allow this enzymatic ability – known as lactase persistence – arose in Europe around 8,000 years ago, and the ostentatious showcasing of a random mutation that nature selected to
...more
