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.
In: 973
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.
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