Human evolution: Has Mother Nature adopted an Agile methodology?

Once, long ago, human biology tested a new feature. Or less a feature than an optimisation of the User Experience of being human.?

Would humanity thrive if a small software upgrade allowed humans to continue to tolerate the lactose in the milk of other animals beyond early childhood?

Problem statement

The background to this was (likely) a close proximity between humans and herd animals. In this way, software from the herd animals (bacteria in the animals’ guts) found its way into a human and made changes to the human operating system (the central nervous system).?

This was achieved via our gut microbiota. Mother Nature introduced a particular gene mutation which would allow new bacteria to thrive in the guts of humans once the bacteria modified it. This benefited the bacteria (lots of new hosts to spread and thrive). Would it benefit the humans?

Test

To test this hypothesis, Mother Nature installed the new software on a Minimum Viable Product (a baby). It’s likely that bacteria was installed via a woman who was pregnant with a boy. The software was thus present in the prenatal microbiota of the boy and able to make changes to the baby’s gene expression during this key developmental window.

Why a boy? Mother Nature has long known that if she wants to trial experimental software, males are better. Males have just one X chromosome and so their DNA is more plastic, especially in early development, meaning that DNA mutations have twice the chance of being installed.

While this might suggest that Mother Nature is leaving a lot to chance, it actually makes a lot of sense. In the vast majority of cases, Mother Nature’s ideas are pretty awful. In fact, virtually all gene mutations are, at best, unnoticed and at worst terrible news for the individual baby testing the software variant.?

So Mother Nature runs a lot of tests.?

Fail and learn

If the software fails and the baby ceases to function, the gene variant is eliminated. But if the software is an upgrade in some way, a male can theoretically install the upgrade in an almost unlimited number of other humans. A female, by contrast, would likely be limited to a maximum of about 20 offspring in a lifetime.?

Prototype, launch, learn, revise, repeat.

In the case of the gene mutation (called an ‘allele’) to tolerate lactose, we can safely say that the experiment was a big success.????

Outcomes

It’s likely that the baby born with lactose tolerance was able to access a rich source of protein and fat far longer than his peers. This would have meant he grew bigger, stronger, and healthier than they did. It’s doubtless the case that this led to the opportunity for him to pass on his mutation to further offspring.?

We know this is true, because Mother Nature only began the test about 7,500 years ago. Today around 80% of European people carry this mutation.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that 80% of us today can tolerate lactose beyond early childhood. When this is the case, the gene variant can be moderated by the presence of certain types of bacteria that would benefit from this. Exposure to this bacteria would come prior to birth from our proximity to our mother’s microbiome. Studies also show differences here can have an effect on how our genes express. We can see in the genome that our microbiomes can be influenced by dietary and environmental factors from at least two generations prior to ourselves. Whether they grew up eating fresh or canned food, had food on demand or periods of hunger, whether they lived in a city or a village, our genes are affected to some extent by microbiome inheritances from our grandparents.?

Constant innovation

Basically, there is a small window of necessity for these bacteria to make changes to the developing baby.?

This is a brilliant innovation on Mother Nature’s part. How can a long-lived organism like a? human adapt to a rapidly changing environment without being wiped out? The answer is in our microbiome. The bacteria there are very short-lived. So they will adapt very quickly to environmental change. By coexisting with such highly adaptive organisms, we can reap the benefit of their rapid Agile evolutionary process. And they can facilitate all kinds of optimisations to help a new human thrive in its environment.

We know that the gut microbiota moderate our immune systems (via our mothers and the first few days in the world, we pick up bacteria that are evolved to live in our environment. Like a cheat sheet on what is a threat and what is normal).?

They also moderate the flow of trophic factors that allow our brains and bones to stay healthy. It’s likely that (for better or worse) many of our drives for certain types of food, activity, even companions, are in some way shaped by the millions of creatures in our unique microbiomes.??

Conclusions

Perhaps it’s wrong to think of our evolution towards becoming a lactose-tolerant species as Mother Nature’s foray into the Agile methodology.

For one thing, we humans have the advantage of foresight to some extent. We don’t always know what will work, but we can certainly eliminate things we know won’t. Nature’s testing process is more brutal. Try everything. If it survives long enough to breed, it gets another round of tests. Because nature doesn’t have an objective. But the microbiota do. Just like us, they want to survive. And if they find an environment (a host) they can work with, they can help the host adapt to its environment better.?

Perhaps then, the real advance is this collaboration between us humans and the bacteria that live inside us.??

Instead, maybe we can think of nature’s Agile method as the process of constant adaptation that is happening within us all the time. Best thing is, we, as perpetual prototypes, don’t need to be discarded with every update.??

What do you think? Does the Agile methodology mirror evolution? Do you think there is a better way to rapidly prototype and test new solutions to customer issues? Are there any other lessons from nature we could adopt in product planning?

Let us know. We’re trying our best to keep evolving.