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Human Genes Still Evolving
MediumFormat writes "The New York Times is running an article that discusses the continuing evolution of human genes. From the article: 'The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.' Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?"
its not that its stopped, its that 5,000 years is an insignificant spec of time.
-ashot
Darwin Awards aside, what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
Applying natural selection as a template, lets look at what it really is. Natural selection is the phenomena of being removed from the gene pool prior to reproduction. Anything else that happens will allow your genes to carry on, which is how evolution works. People probably assumed that evolution stopped because they assume that most people manage to successfully reproduce prior to their death.
Of course human genes are still evolving; you just have to examine what it is these days that limits people in reproductivity, and what encourages them. It's obvious that we, as a species, should ever so slightly more alcohol-resistant, because drunk driving kills a lot of young people before they can reproduce. Also, the males will become more resistant to female-hormone-like substances in their food. Then there's work-related stress (adrenaline), and last but not least war, which takes, and has been taking out a huge number of ill-fated or aggressive young men.
However, there are more things killing off the *weaker* individuals too: smoking (and drugs,alcohol,etc), car crashes, HIV/AIDS, and let's not forget Modern Weapons like SCUD missiles, Nuclear warheads, GW Bush, etc.
how flawed is your society? flawedsociety.myfreelancejobs.com
I mean really? Come on...
You go to college, work your arse off, earn lots of money, die without kids, the race doesn't get your genes. You're a single parent living on state benefit with 12 kids... big contribution to the gene pool.
Deleted
Part of evolution is adaptation to the environment. We are changing the environment (civilization, medicine, technology, etc.) far faster than evolution can react to it, so to speak, given the length of a human generation. We are seriously adapting the environment to us, rather than the other way around.
You cannot stop natural selection, you can only change the selection criteria.
Small children are naturally scared of spiders, snakes and the like. This is no longer such an important criterion, so it is likely to wither.
For example, as the advertisments in London keep reminding us, colisions with cars is a a major killer of children and teens. Hopefully we'll eventually breed for kids that don't run out into the bloody road without looking.
And finally, your argument that "weaker individuals aren't killed off" by traditional perils like disease and conflict simply fails to apply in the third world, where the majority of the human race lives. Give them a few more generations, and they will be superior to your soft white first-world ass.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
That evolution doesn't give a toss about your concept of strength or of fitness, and guess what... poor people have more children than rich people do...
Deleted
Genetically, we have a concept called races.
No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I hate to see all these comments talking about how evolution mechanisms are failing in the modern world.
We can't escape natural selection, no matter how many pills and safety mechanisms we introduce into society.
Women just tend to become more and more picky with whom they mate. And while things like good eye sight become less important, other things take their place. Things like having lots of money, social skills/social network, an athletic body, cooking skills and so on.
Here in Europe, the number of babies born per adult keep falling. This means it is actually getting harder to reproduce than it was in a past, poorer Europe.
Will code a sig generator for food
A few generations are enough, particularly in areas with high mortality rates, high levels of disease. It just doesn't apply to the individual.
Deleted
And finally, your argument that "weaker individuals aren't killed off" by traditional perils like disease and conflict simply fails to apply in the third world, where the majority of the human race lives. Give them a few more generations, and they will be superior to your soft white first-world ass.
Third-worlders already are evolutionarily "superior" to white first-worlders -- by their selection criteria, i.e. the genetic makeup of a "white first-worlder" is likely to be disadvantageous when placed in the third-world environment. And vice versa. This almost goes by definition. Each adapted to their own environment, and it's meaningless to say that one is superior to another unless they are in the same environment.
That's exactly the mistake that most people make when they talk about evolution. It's not just down to the ability to stay alive long enough, i.e. not all selectors involve organism death.
Some people lead long, healthy active lives and never reproduce through choice, lack of opportunity or possibly just inadequate social skills. Isaac Newton famously died a virgin.
People may also reproduce but choose the best partner to reproduce with, thus ensuring their line dies out in the future. Or social fashions may influence the reproductive choices of generations, i.e. big is beautiful, or slender, Blonde or brunette etc.
And lets not even start on the concept of nations and other communal groupings competing with each other...
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
If you want to evolve
Individuals don't evolve.
sudo ergo sum
Evolution involves the death of weaker individuals before they can breed. With soap (the yardstick of civilisation), surgery, rescue helicopters, dentistry, wheelchairs etc, weaker individuals aren't killed off so easily before they can breed.
This is a common misconception, evolution is not really about killing off the "weak" before they breed. Evolution involves two factors: changes to the genetic structure over time, and spreading those new genes as far as possible in the environment they inhabit.
The rate at which new changes are introduced is called the mutation rate and is independent of any level of civilisation we have acheived so far.
The second factor is spreading those new genes as far possible, that they be successful. But what determines a "successful" gene? The environment it finds itself in. When you move from a primitive environment to a civilised one the rules of the game change. A genetic hindrance in one environment may be neutral or beneficial in the other. For example, in it's original West African environment the gene that causes sickle-cell anemia is a beneficial one, offering a level of protection against malaria. In the people with this gene that were moved to the US, it just became a hindrance. In the absence of regular malaria epidemics the incidence of the sickle-cell gene has been observed slowly falling.
Favoured genes are not just about being stronger. Some genetic traits are highly successful because they are more sexually appealing to potential mates. The peacock's tail and the blue-eyed, blonde-haired northern European are both examples of this.
So evolution is alive and well, even for civilised beings. The mutation rate is constant and we are still adapting to our (civilised) environment.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
Science is bullshit.. Science could say anything
Right, you can use science to prove anything that's even remotely true. You've got a much freer hand wirth religion, hence it's not bullshit.
The concept of race will not go away just because science disproves of it. The concept of race will never go away just like Christianity will never go away.
Yeah, but don't we just wish that they would.
the only thing that passes on from generation to generation is culture.
Have we forgotten Einsteinian physics and Darwinian Evolution? Oh wait, you Americans almost have done that.
Cultural conservativism is the answer.
Must be the wrong question then.
Always follow the economy.
Make up your mind if you're a Christian or a capitalism. Morals or Money.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Bullshit. Culture has never been a static, unchanging entity. Culture is whatever we as a society wish it to be, and it changes all the time.
Indeed, science has had an amazing impact on culture in the last 100 years. We moved from a culture of travel by foot and horse to an automotive culture. We've gone from Uncle George playing a banjo to carrying whatever music we want wherever we want on portable music devices. We've gone from having to spend hours at the library to look up an obscure fact to having information at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We've gone from candles and oil lamps to electric lights. And perhaps most noticably, we've gone from getting together with friends and family, or reading a book, or playing a board game, to sitting in front of the TV set.
Sorry, but our culture is very heavily influenced by science. It wasn't that long ago in certain parts of the Western world where the area you were allowed to sit in on the bus was determined by the colour of your skin -- something which is no longer part of any Western culture (except in the minds of a few deluded racists who think that culture is static and unchanging, so long as they get to dictate what culture is).
Yes, some parts of culture are sufficiently ingrained that it is hard to overcome their momentum -- but it is hardly impossible to do so. Major events and new ideas and inventions are changing culture every day.
I'm sure 10+ years ago there were some old white guys in South Africa who were convinced that Apartheid would never end as well -- and yet here we are. Women are allowed to vote everywhere in the Westernized world as well, in case nobody had bothered to tell you.
Sorry, but you come across as an appologist for racists and bigots with a dumb comment like that. Culture changes. Get used to it. Discrimination is not a given -- it's a completely learned trait
Yaz.
[insert insightful comment about the ID joke here]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The summary text asks, perhaps rhetorically, "What made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?" I think it's a hangover from obsolete religious thinking - the great chain of being, the lower and higher forms of life, with Man at the pinnacle, made in God's own image, the crowning achievement of Creation.
Most Christians seem to have managed to accept evolution as a historical fact, but still wish to give Man special status. Evolution is how God created us, eh? But that still makes us the aim and end purpose of evolution, the special species, the one beloved of God and made in his image. No wonder the idea is widespread that evolution has somehow stopped, or finished, having now produced us.
Of course evolution hasn't finished; we're still evolving, along with everything else that's alive. But that means that in time we'll be gone, perhaps replaced by one or more descendant species, perhaps merely extinct and forgotten save for a few relics in deep space and a thin layer of mildly radioactive isotopes to be discovered by future geologists. It means that there's nothing special about us, we're just a blink of an eye in the Earth's history... Not something most people are too happy to believe.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This is a very good point that quite a lot of people don't seem to get. Anything that causes a person not to reproduce is (eventually) selected against. For example, being sensitive to the meme "there are too many people on this world" is an evolutionary disadvantage and will eventually be removed from the genepool. The same goes for high intelligence (being that intelligent people often don't reproduce).
:)
That's probably also why religion is so prevalent in human populations: the evolutionary advantage it gives should not be underestimated.
So if you consider people like you to be a good addition to the human gene pool, breed!
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
2. Knowingly allowing, accepting, and encouraging reproduction of individuals, who...shouldn't (No, I don't mean Bush). There's some bad genes out there. Some that shouldn't be passed on. While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
Ah yes, we have heard that one before, haven't we?
This might just invoke Godwin's law, but this is the exact type of argument that was used to legitimize the holocaust and forced stilarisation projects in the 1940s.
Sorry but it doesn't work like that.
While you are right that there are genes that are a disadvantage at least in specific situations, those will be weeded out over time due to such individuals being less attractive. There is no need to 'not allow' those to reproduce.
While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
No. No. No. Eugenics is not just wrong. It's painfully stupid.
Why does evolution work? What is the secret. The secret my friends is randomness.
Randomness is the process which drives evolution. The universe is a vast, unpredicable chaotic system. It is only by randomly searching through many possible solutions that a species can hope to adapt to any enviornment.
The minute you take out randomness, by taking away genes or introducing them, you've stopped evolving, and have started specialising. And guess what happens to specialist species when their enviornment changes? That's right. They die.
Evolve dolphins with bigger lungs so they can dive deeper, kill off all lesser lunged dolphins. Then earths 02 levels drop by 2%. Ooops. Specialised, deep sea feeding dolphins are dead meat. With a random system, there would still be some lower lung capacity dolphins around.
Think this doesn't apply to people? Ask yourself this? Can you say with certainty what genes will be beneficial or detrimental to humanities survival in 1 million years time? What about 10,00 years time? 100 years? 10 years? Who would have predicted even 20 years ago that "geek" traits would be in such demand? Can you say what genes are beneficial or detrimental right now!?
Yet you want to throw out the single most powerful aspect of evolution. Random chance. It's got us where we are today, and if you think anyone can engineer an entire planet and its ecosystem half as well as random evolution, I'd like to see you try.
For an example of the superiority of evolution over engineering, just check out evolved antennas. NASA seems to think random evolution is just fine.
May the Maths Be with you!
Lets put it this way, humans are not going to ever loose their pinky finger if modern society goes on the way it is.
I don't think you can expect any MAJOR changes in an evolutionary model that does not ELIMINATE unfavorable characterists. We live in society's in which pretty much everybody reproduces and most of those reproductions end up reproducing themself. For those who cannot cope with society, we have public assistance and jail.
If anything, I believe modern evolutionary pressure (the last three hundred years) is producing more of the genes from people who have poor family planning skills and just cannot grasp or accept birth control. I fear what this pattern may produce in 20,000 years where people with less cognitive skills have 3-4 times more children than those with more cognitive skills. That and the other pressure for religious fanatics to have more children than those who take rational views of the world. Those with deep intellect could be forced to create a "Zardoz" society to protect themselves.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Exactly right.
Evolution doesn't necessarily mean "good"--or at least not in any sense that we'd usually use the word.
Common misconception.
IF survival depended on mod points, then all slashdotters would evolve to be able to post within two minutes of the story submission appearing, seeing as how almost all of the highest rated comments are posted within a very narrow window of time.
i disable sigs
Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
At the risk of sounding abrasive, that statement is a simplification. It is true that there is more genetic variability within a 'race' than between 'races', and that one cannot determine 'race' using a DNA test. However, there are very real medical conditions that are exhibited more frequently in specific 'races' because those conditions have a genetic basis. These differences are of interest genetically.
But who would you say is intelligent? It seems to me like you are confusing making a carreer for yourself with beeing genetically superior in terms of intelligence.
How many great minds are not being spent looking for food on garbage dumps in Africa? Or go their whole life without ever getting access to even basic education? If you examine the phd's of the world and compare their genes to the genes of the homeless, it would be very surprising if you found any regular difference.
Genetically, you are not in any way inferior because you spend your days trying to survive starvation, or flip burgers for minimum-wage at McDonalds.
You are giving examples of genetic dispositions in ethnic groups, but the term "races" applied to humans is still not defined in any meaningful way.
It's nice to know that a post composed primarily of logically flawed, inaccurate arguments still gets +5.
Without disagreeing with you, what part of your argument refutes the idea that the concept of race is not supported by genetics?
All you've done is give examples of genetic anomalies that are present in populations. Those genetice anomalies are a response to environment, and have nothing to do with the race of the individual.
To explain it to you so you understand, if you moved groups of different "races" around, they would eventually develop similar genetic anomalies.
I think you're trying to wedge a social argument into a discusiion of genetics, but none of what you say is supported by fact.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
The question of "race" is problematic, as the parent post itself shows. For examples of race, the poster gives "African-American," "Chinese," and "Jewish."
Which of these are "races"? Is race determined by continent of origin? Country? Region (Tay-Sachs affects the Ashkenazi Jews--are they a separate race from the Sephardic)?
Of course there are genetic differences between groups. But these variations do not match up very well with conventional (cultural) concepts of race, which are often based simply on skin color or other physical attributes, and sometimes on national origin.
No, it can only be selected if there is genetic differentiation in it. So if susceptibility levels to the "full world" meme vary for different alleles of the same gene, the less susceptible versions will be selected for. But if that genetic variation doesn't exist, it can't be selected for.
It works the other way round, too. Anything that has evolved has clearly been subject to inheritable differences in the past, and it probably still is, unless the selective pressure for it is so strong that the population is essentially homeogenous. This is the strongest argument for there being a genetic basis to intelligence level, since intelligence has clearly evolved in the fairly recent past.
If you're looking for a massive plague that would have conferred resistance on survivors, that would suit the argument.
(And yet we're looking at the bird flu now. Also the pandemics of 1957 and 1968. The picture's muddied by modern vaccination practices, which were having some grab by '57.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It is a conceit of the intelligent that intelligence drives human evolution. The skeletons of early hominids show evidence of the support of unproductive individuals within communities. Skeletons with broken but healed limbs, crippling arthritis, debilitating head wounds show that individuals that had been injured or were elderly were cared for by their peers/relations. The intelligent thing to do would be to ditch the dead weight and ease pressure on resources. Instead the human attributes demonstrated are compassion and co-operation. As for man getting less-healthy, no-one can tell which genes will be be favoured by the whims of nature and the wider the gene pool the better. In Europe sickle cell anaemia is an illness, in malarial zones it's an eveolutionary adaptation that aids survival. Who is to say what's healthy and what isn't. We have survived and prospered through our abilities to communicate and co-operate. Intelligence has followed on the coattails of our advancement and has not driven it. If a near-extinction meteor impact were to occur, would the species' best hope of survival lie with a select group of the Intelligensia or a select group of fertile people with excellent parenting skills? Think on this: You, dear reader, may regard yourself as intelligent and may pride yourself on your ability to read PERL or code in binary but that doesn't make babies. It is true that the "intelligent" breed less. The brutal fact is the geekier you are the less likely you are to reproduce and so when you have finished that algol compiler you've been working on and want to pat yourself on the back for being clever, remind yourself that you are not the pinnacle of human evolution and just an offshoot. The single mother successfully stretching out her budget raising four kids is more likely to leave an indelible imprint on the evolution of Man than you are.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
what made people think that evolution stopped with the modern era?
That would be mathematics. Given the size of the gene pool, the time it takes a mutation, even a favorable one, to become dominant is approximately forever.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is an example of group selection, and it has selected many genes at once; some of them may have helped Europeans in their conquests, others may have just been along for the ride.
Are you of the Nazi philosophy? They also believed in the genteic supiriority of the aryan (european) race, and also thought such was a justification in the might is right sense.
Evolution is a much larger and longer process, requiring thousands upon thousands of generations and much more powerfull selection factors than just being more technologicly advanced at the time.
Much more importantly, your statements actually reflect a dirth of knowledge in history during and prior to the 17th-20th centuries. In the last 300 years or so, the europeans have been very succesfull, but i assure you, they didnt suddenly evolve a supirior genetic make-up in that time to cause so. One would have to argue that the european war making and technical advantages were from beter gene makeup, from there you would have to defend european advances against their basis... since a great portion of the european knowledge base they improved upon derived from asia and africa (gunpowder, paper, algerbra, the compass, etc...), at which point it becomes painfully obvious that genes have little to do with it.
Would you conisder islam and/or the moors to have been geneticly supirior as they took over much of southern europe and old rome for a time? Would you consider ghengis khan and the hordes he left behind equally geneticly supirior when they conquested more of the known world than has ever been done before? How about the japanese conquest of asia? the egyptians & nubians who ran for 10000 years or more? etc...
Most new genetic development is resultant of mating selection pressures and epidemic disease immunity's. We have had countless plagues sweep the world until the mid 20th century (anti-biotics, medicine, etc..) which aggresivly thinned out those ill-equipped to survive them. We have also semi-steadily reduced those who are geneticly pre-disposed to extreme anti-social behavior (not necesarily criminal behavior but "impaired" or "stunted" behavior), and we can expect as time marches forward for those who are less capable of intergrating with the essentials of modern society will be less likely to reproduce, etc...
However, the shifts in political / population drifts are not in any way related to some sort of genetic supiriority, and even more importantly, genetics is more of a massive numbers game than a conquest (distribution) model. In the long run the asians are currently "winning" with massive genetic presence in the human species, and europeans are next to last.
Dont confuse genetics with politics.... its a really bad idea... which has resulted in some really bad consequences.
consequences we are still paying for.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I remember reading the story in Ishmael about the jellyfish's history of the world. Basically the jellyfish is the highest evolved creature in the story and it ends with "And then, there was the jellyfish!" And at the time I read it (13), it was an eye opener because I believe I had thought like a lot of people think still that we were just the top of the food chain and nothing better would ever come along. I guess from the tag of this article most people haven't read that book or had that thought, that perhaps we aren't the most evolved thing Earth has ever seen, and we'll probably be a more primal species like a monkey is to us in a matter of millions of years. I can't believe anyone actually thought evolution stopped.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Latex allergies mean - - no condoms (other materials are definately not as effective).
Therefore, more offspring.
Latex allergy is a genetic condition. So some of those offspring will also be allergic to latex.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That isn't what he is saying. Natural selection doesn't always "select" the better gene... or in this case it isn't acting on whether one gene is better than another. A group is simply wholesale overridden by another for whatever reason (such as war or colonization.)
That action is, in fact, natural selection at work but not in the limited way we typically think of it. It has nothing to do with whos genes are superior, a master race, or any of that other crap. However the fact is that european/western genes are some of the most widely-spread (as a group).
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I don't think we need the original paper, I learned this in high school biology. Evolution never stops, there is no perfectly evolved thing
However, evolution doesn't really seek perfection--it is prone to find a local optimum, where any deviation from the mean reduces fitness, and get "stuck" there. So instead of a continuous climb, most species could be sitting at the summits of local fitness peaks, changing only in response to changes in the environment (or, in the modern world, relocation to a different environment) such as new diseases, new foods, changes in climate, etc.
How was this modded UP!? I feel so strongly about what you wrote I'm trying to make a rare comment which'll probably never see the light of day on /. Still, a fellas gotta take a swing when people get outright dangerous spreading the kind of crap you're spouting. I don't know where to start, your comments are so off the wall I can't tell if you get this stuff off of T.V. or not. Certainly not slashdot, which I read everyday, and I've not heard this kind of total crap before.
First of all NOBODY has done ANY survey of AFRICAN I.Q.s There are 54 countries and a plethora of territories in Africa, a BILLION+ people, and more than 5,000 tribes who are culturally, linguistically and genetically differentiated - and range from the absolutely languid to those who make the Swiss seem relaxed. The total number of languages and dialects is UNKNOWN. In Nigeria alone there are more than 470 distinctive languages and dialects. English is NOT the majority language on the continent as almost EVERYONE has a primary native tongue and may or may not ADDITIONALLY speak - from broken to fluent - English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Afrikaans, or German, as a second or third tongue, though most people speak at least two languages other than European ones because of the local variety. So give your CNN (which I watch a lot) viewpoint a rest.
I never cease to marvel at the rude comments people make about how badly "Africans" (which ones?) speak English on TV when interviewed. How many languages do you speak other than your native tongue? And how many of those, if any, do you speak fluently? The point is any of the IQ tests you might refer to - Raven's math matrices or not - are administered in European languages and anybody with an IQ over 12 who has looked at or read the extensive literature on the construction of those tests knows they are culturally loaded and biased in a lot of ways, including how the math questions are constructed (context not content). And No, they have not been fixed. (I took one for fun a few weeks ago and if that's fixed I think you mean "fixed".
When you say "Asians" are you making the same hand-waving racial and langauge generalization as before? Or do you differentiate between Asian-Americans (a complex category) and Asians outside of America? Does that include Turkmen, Mongolians, Burmese, and Malaysians - or did you have a well-picked few in mind? Give me a break pleeease! I'd like to see you take an IQ test in a second language you don't speak well and do as well. Set your time machine for the 21st century dude and bring your mind back from its comforting romantic and historical Victorian travels about Africans (or did you really mean "Blacks"?) having IQs lower than your own.
More relevantly, do you personally know anything about the University of Witwatersand? And its tests? (in Afrikaans) For that matter do you know anything about Afrikaans and how South Africans of non-European descent feel about it even though they're were required to learn it? Or about South Africa and its pre- and post-apartheid educational and ethnic research? These are the same kinds of folks who were researching how to build a genetic virus that would selectively eradicate the native Zulu and other native African tribal populations in South Africa so they could inherit the land. And despite all you've seen on American TV (Wow!) including 'Tsotsi' just winning an academy award, believe it or not, your argument went deep south in a blasted hurry the moment you put "University of the Witwatersrand" and "(a liberal college in South Africa)" in the same sentence. What planet do you live on?
On a personal level I'm from Nigeria and went to poor but good schools in Lagos. I've learnt English as a second language and was, as far as the results of intellectual efforts were concerned, a wee bit more than average with respect to my classmates - many of whom were and are seriously smarter than I was or presumably am. My IQ, when then tested, was 183. So give me some oxygen fella, unless you've been running some massive covert