 
So I was standing in line at Starbucks behind some woman with really beautiful long curly hair. And, I started trying to remember whether curly hair was a dominant or recessive gene. It’s dominant. Then I started thinking about dark skin, dark eyes, unattached earlobes (are webbed fingers/toes recessive or just rare?) and the whole litany of traits that we mapped in jr. high school biology. No big deal, until I started to consider the role of physiological adaptation in the process of human evolution. Absent the environmental context that shapes human development into new directions, these changes are simply genetic mutations; rather than adaptive mutations that arise in communities of humans through processes of selective breeding. So, if you take these mutated genetic constructions and pair them with the chromosomes from humans who continued to thrive in the environment that gave rise to humans in the first place (i.e. the environment most supportive of human form, as evidenced by the fact that humans do not need to adapt in order to thrive) the original genetic expression would be preferred. This is nothing more than genetic dominance.
My point. As I stood in line waiting to order my black and white raspberry mocha, I wondered if genetic dominance is a trace of human evolution; mapping the development of our species. Dominant traits therefore would be phenotypes that point us toward reconstructing how the original humans looked. Right? Archaeological evidence already taught us that human civilization began in Africa. More recent technological advancements have enabled the path of human migration to be traced through genetic markers on the Y-chromosome (each male’s Y-chromosome is an identical replica of his father’s Y-chromosome, so mutations mark a man’s descendants forever), and we have discovered that there were 2 migrations out of Africa. The first went from Africa and followed the coastline along the bottom of Asia, and ended in Australia; landlocked in Oceania. The second migration, which was prompted by the most recent ice-age about 50,000 years ago, went from Africa to Asia, Europe, North America, and then South America. All this we know. So, I’m curious, as I sit here sipping liquid caffeine in a sugar base, are dominant and recessive genes relics of our evolutionary story which point us toward the original form of our species; functioning completely independent of environmental contexts? The original form when paired with a mutation is hard-wired into our genetic mapping to be preferred. I don’t know. Just a thought.
Take away point:
Procrastination is a beast to control, because I'm here to write a paper on the role of economic, social, and political factors in the public policy formation process...
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