Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story

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Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

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Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I wonder which force will be stronger...the diverging gene selections resulting in several different hominid species in a few thousand years...or will our culture and continued global interaction keep the gene pool in one species with a large range of possible selections in our DNA.

What will be Pat's chosen method of God smiting the NYT?

Hurricane?

Tornado?

Fire?

Meteors?

cute...

I'm happy to see the scientists are catching up. :P

That's HERESY!!!!

As if Humans were somehow the panicle of evolutionary achievement. I don't know why anyone suspected otherwise, and the only reason I can come up with is a sense of arrogance.

I've always wondered what modern civilization is doing to Human Evolution. In a sense, Humanity has begun to meddle in their own evolution by circumventing Natural Selection, much the same way Humanity has modified the planet. We have a plethora of social disorders, many of which would result in those infected outcast in a more primitive society, but instead in our society are allowed to breed and pass on those genetic traits to their children. Those children then grow up to have other children who then may once again spread those genes among the population.

I know this line of thinking reeks of Eugenics (something that is disgusting) but that does not invalidate the seriousness of the question. What are we doing to ourselves, and what will be the long term consequences for our actions?

(Frankly, I think the only humane thing to do is take our own evolution into our own hands by embracing Genetic Modification.)

published in the Journal of Biosocial Science a couple of years back that reported a link between Ashkenazi intelligence genes and susceptibility to genetic disorders.

"According to the study, Ashkenazim do better than average on IQ tests, scoring some 12-15 points above the test’s mean value. But they also are more likely than any other ethnic groups to suffer from diseases such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s disease and Niemann-Pick — related conditions that can be debilitating and deadly."

Supposedly, "because European Jews in medieval times were restricted to jobs in finance, money lending and long-distance trade — occupations that required greater mental gymnastics than fields such as farming, dominated by non-Jews — their codes over the course of some generations selected genes for enhanced intellectual ability.

This process allowed these Jews to thrive in the limited scope of professions they were allowed to pursue. Further, in contrast to today, those who attained financial success in that period often tended to have more children than those who were less financially stable, and those children tended to live longer."

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/26134/edition_id/505/format/html/displaystory.html

I'm pretty sure that this is an unpublished copy of that paper:

Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence

http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

There should be more studies on things like this. It'd be interesting to know just what exactly is effecting our evolution. It's not exactly a process we can currently stop, and it's not exactly a process that always brings about beneficial changes.

More reliance on elective plastic surgery leads to more ugly babies, which leads to more plastic surgery, and so on, and so on, and so on.....

I know Dutch people can consume more dairy than anyone else on earth. Probably due to a thousand years of basically living off cheese and milk.

Seriously, my wife was shocked to discover just how much dairy we consume. That, and I've never met a lactose intolerant dutch person.

I'm sure there all sorts of little changes like this going on all the time. Just because it doesn't give you spots or make your teeth sharper, or something obvious like that, doesn't mean evolution has stopped.

Why do people say humans aren’t evolving? In general the fossil record is one of species appearing suddenly lasting millions of years and then disappearing. This would tend to indicate that although the random mutation rate is fairly constant, large breading populations tend to suppress large macroscopic morphology changes. The findings are interesting since they help to show what evolutionary changes are occurring in species with large populations and ranges. This is something that isn’t easy to tell from the fossil record. Given the mobility and gene transfer on the global scale for humans it seems highly unlikely that speciation will occur in the future.