If East Asians Developed Epicanthic Folds To Adapt To Snow Blindness, Then Why Didn’t Northern Europeans Develop The Same Trait?

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I’ve read that East Asians developed slanted eyes or Epicanthic Folds as a way to adapt to snow blindness in the more snowy and colder regions of Asia, and I was wondering why Northern Europeans, specifically Germanic and Nordic people that lived in the colder regions of Northern Europe, didn’t develop the same genetic trait or at least something similar to it.

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31 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It wasn’t so much about the snow but more about the wind. That’s why some indigenous Australian tribes have it as well.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Different traits randomly appear in any given population, and stay if they help the population survive in that particular environment. (That only beneficial or neutral traits survive, no matter how convulated or non-intuitive, make the random traits that do survive erroneously seem, to a casual observer, like an intelligent designer) This particular trait probably never appeared in Northern Europeans, and/or they had/have another trait that compensates.

Anonymous 0 Comments

>I was wondering why Northern Europeans, specifically Germanic and Nordic people that lived in the colder regions of Northern Europe,

You mean like the Sami? Northern Europeans with epicanthic folds.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Two things here.

Firstly, we don’t actually know why epicanthal folds developed, everything right now is just possibilities with various degrees of plausibility.

Second, evolution isn’t inevitable. There’s no list of optimal traits for an environment that it goes down and makes happen. How evolution actually works is that sometimes mutations occur, and sometimes those mutations happen to be beneficial, so creatures with that mutation are better at reproducing, so that mutation becomes more common in the population gene pool over time.

Epicanthal folds only arise if a mutation that causes them occurs, and that feature happens to be advantageous in some way (which could be for any number of reasons, including potential mates just finding them attractive – they don’t necessarily need to have a function). If epicanthal folds are of benefit in bright terrain, then Europeans didn’t evolve them because the mutation that causes them simply never happened. If it had, it would have been selected for, but it didn’t.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Evolution takes random paths that may or may not lead to useful features. We have the power of hindsight to guess which conditions might have led to a feature, but there is not telling which features will appear. Your question can be generalized to why don’t all animals fly or why don’t all animals run very fast. It may be the case that no others had the mutations that led to folds or some had mutations but that did not give them enough survival fitness to propogate their genes

Anonymous 0 Comments

Evolution won’t do the same thing necessary in the same condition in 2 separate events/times etc.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You mean like … the Sami people?

Check out any old pictures of the Sami before they interbred with other Europeans, and you will see that they developped the same epicanthal folds as Asians, as an adaptation to cold.

Most Europeans you see today evolved in more Southern latitudes

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m Finnish and have epicanthic folds. Turns out they’re relatively common here, and have even been used as an argument for our subhumanity in eugenics. Nobody else in my family has them.

Just an observation, definitely not an ELI5 answer, but pointing out that this isn’t unheard of.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m no scientist but maybe because northern Europeans had a protruded brow from Neanderthal ancestors that helped against that?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because evolution is a random mutation that becomes prominent due to environment & survival needs

There’s no why it came to be, just why it became a common trait