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I think the map is quite statistically irrelevant for some countries, such as Romania. Here is the table with the number of samples taken from each country: http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/table?uid=PIIS0960982208009561&tableid=tbl1&popup=y Romania (population 23 milion) had only 12 samples taken! In comparison, Netherlands (population 16 milion) had 500 samples taken. Other genetically diverse countries with small (or too localized) samples include France, Italy or Portugal. Of course, as others pointed out, add to this the fact that not all populations were studied, among which populations which had huge genetical influence, especially in South-Eastern Europe (Turkish, northern Slavic, Arab, Maurish, North African, Indian-gipsy etc)... So I find the map totally irrelevant under these conditions...

Shall we?

Actually, the article sort of sucks, so don't fault folks for getting the wrong impression from it. The real paper's summary section is a heck of a lot more clear (if drier and less overdramatic) than the article.

The article is definately out of whack. What they were measuring were the developments over time, not the mutations. In fact, there's no way to classify most mutations as beneficial or detrimental unless you actually sit and watch to see if they survive. Furthermore, from the actual paper it looks like this was a study of natural phylogeny, not sitting around watching generation after generation grow.

I think that you might find the answer in the original science paper, which unfortunately costs $30. (Link thanks to this comment.)

The submission is someone putting a spin to a story of someone putting a spin to a story based on someone putting a spin on this original scientific article.

We propose that developmental evolution is primarily governed by selection and/or selection-independent constraints, not stochastic processes such as drift in unconstrained phenotypic space.

This is a link to the paper cited in the article:

http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982207021938

From the abstract of the original article: "We propose that developmental evolution is primarily governed by selection and/or selection-independent constraints, not stochastic processes such as drift in unconstrained phenotypic space."

The summary and title are misleading. http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/abstract?uid=PIIS0960982207021938

Selection is deterministic, drift is random. This is really no news, other than for developmental question at hand, whether a variation observed can be explained through deterministic or stochastic process.

As usual, the linked artice is sparse on actual details. Here's a link to the actual article in Current Biology:

http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/abs tract?uid=PIIS0960982206026583&highlight=haynes

The full text requires a subscription, but I've pasted the abstract below:

Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain

When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased [1, 2]. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention [3]. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses [4, 5], holding in mind a set of potential choices [6], tracking the memory of previous responses [7], or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory [8, 9, 10]. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.

Also, the final paragraph from the conclusion, which discusses where they'd like to go with this in the future:

Taken together, our results extend previous studies on the processing of goals in prefrontal cortex in several important ways. They reveal for the first time that spatial response patterns in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex encode a subject's covert intentions in a highly specific fashion. They also demonstrate a functional separation in medial prefrontal cortex, where more anterior regions encode the intention prior to its execution and more posterior regions encode the intention during task execution. These findings have important implications not only for the neural models of executive control, but also for technical and clinical applications, such as the further development of brain-computer interfaces, that might now be able to decode intentions that go beyond simple movements and extend to high-level cognitive processes.

You can already read the paper for free.

...so we could have skipped the inevitable trolling by people that haven't read the damn article, seeing that the damn introduction effin' explains why the damn observation is effin' novel?

http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/ful ltext/?uid=PIIS0960982207008019

There are also damn videos going along with the damn artice, which might be of effin' MILD interest to people reading this slashdot entry, MAYBE?

http://www.current-biology.com/cgi/content/full/CU RBIO/unassign/PIIS0960982207008019/

Man. Editors. Send in the chimps with the pointy sticks.

...so we could have skipped the inevitable trolling by people that haven't read the damn article, seeing that the damn introduction effin' explains why the damn observation is effin' novel?

http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/ful ltext/?uid=PIIS0960982207008019

There are also damn videos going along with the damn artice, which might be of effin' MILD interest to people reading this slashdot entry, MAYBE?

http://www.current-biology.com/cgi/content/full/CU RBIO/unassign/PIIS0960982207008019/

Man. Editors. Send in the chimps with the pointy sticks.

Worldwide urbanization and the ongoing rise of urban noise levels form a major threat to living conditions in and around cities. Urban environments typically homogenize animal communities, and this results, for example, in the same few bird species' being found everywhere. Insight into the behavioral strategies of the urban survivors may explain the sensitivity of other species to urban selection pressures. Here, we show that songs that are important to mate attraction and territory defense have significantly diverged in great tits (Parus major), a very successful urban species. Urban songs were shorter and sung faster than songs in forests, and often concerned atypical song types. Furthermore, we found consistently higher minimum frequencies in ten out of ten city-forest comparisons from London to Prague and from Amsterdam to Paris. Anthropogenic noise is most likely a dominant factor driving these dramatic changes. These data provide the most consistent evidence supporting the acoustic-adaptation hypothesis since it was postulated in the early seventies. At the same time, they reveal a behavioral plasticity that may be key to urban success and the lack of which may explain detrimental effects on bird communities that live in noisy urbanized areas or along highways.

Worldwide urbanization and the ongoing rise of urban noise levels form a major threat to living conditions in and around cities. Urban environments typically homogenize animal communities, and this results, for example, in the same few bird species' being found everywhere. Insight into the behavioral strategies of the urban survivors may explain the sensitivity of other species to urban selection pressures. Here, we show that songs that are important to mate attraction and territory defense have significantly diverged in great tits (Parus major), a very successful urban species. Urban songs were shorter and sung faster than songs in forests, and often concerned atypical song types. Furthermore, we found consistently higher minimum frequencies in ten out of ten city-forest comparisons from London to Prague and from Amsterdam to Paris. Anthropogenic noise is most likely a dominant factor driving these dramatic changes. These data provide the most consistent evidence supporting the acoustic-adaptation hypothesis since it was postulated in the early seventies. At the same time, they reveal a behavioral plasticity that may be key to urban success and the lack of which may explain detrimental effects on bird communities that live in noisy urbanized areas or along highways.