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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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.
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.
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
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