Humanity's Genetic Diversity on the Decline

jd writes "In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population."

Comments

Re:Is this news?

[Bob-taro]

It's misconceptions like these that make it easier for cranky American Protestants to think of 'Evolutionism' as just another faith. It's not that it's a "faith", per se. It's just that it's a theory based on the NON-existence of a creator. If you don't believe in a creator, you can I can look at the same data all day, and come to different conclusions. The non-believers, or course, claim to have the "unbiased" view, but there's really no such thing. You might say, "ID is stupid when there's this perfectly good scientific explanation". Well, if you regard invoking a creator as "stupid", then you've shown that you're biased against that idea, just as I am biased against the idea that the universe "just happened" without a purposeful, creative agent behind it. And yes, I realize there are a lot of people who believe both -- the "God created the mechanism of evolution" view. That's fine, but for me I think that view assumes a solider scientific foundation for evolution than actually exists.