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Humans Evolving 100 Times Faster Than Ever

Posted by kdawson on from the or-maybe-we're-just-getting-more-intelligently-designed dept.

John Hawks writes "A new genomics study in PNAS shows that humans have been evolving new adaptive genes during the past 10,000 years much faster than ever before. The study says that evolution has sped up because of population growth, making people adapt faster to new diseases, new diets, and social changes like cities. Oh, and I'm the lead author. I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and let me just say that our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls."

4 of 584 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not anymore by Rezazur · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think you meant sickle cell anaemia where defective red blood cells are less prone to malaria infection.

  2. Re:Check Out the Sample Size by hansg · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the lead author on the study submitted the summary - why didn't he link to a proper paper rather than the press release junk? Maybe because it's not a press release, but a news article from Reuters? And if you bothered to RTFA (yes, i know, I'm new here) it says that the study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is a pretty important paper.

    Since they peer-review their articles, I would imagine that other experts thought 270 people ought to be good enough for everyone...

    /Hans

    --
    I don't have one
  3. Re:Evolving OR Mutating faster? by John+Hawks · · Score: 5, Informative

    The rate of mutations per genome has not changed, as far as we can tell. What is happening is that the overall larger number of people has generated more potential adaptive mutations, and these have been captured by selection. As a result, the neutral genetic changes in the population have slowed -- these being inversely proportional to population size. The very small fraction of mutations that are adaptive have caused rapid change by selection. Great question, I'll put it in the FAQ.

  4. Re:Bad Science by John+Hawks · · Score: 5, Informative

    Good comment.

    Here's the answer: natural selection takes initially rare mutations and magnifies them to large numbers, spreading them to most of the population rapidly. Our survey was looking at things between 20 and 80 percent frequency in living populations. That means that the average person has around half the new selected mutations, even though each mutation is very recent. As a result, genetically today's people really are radically different than the average person living 5,000 years ago -- it's within the last 5000 years we are seeing the most rapid change in frequency of these new alleles.

    This rapid evolutionary change has also been skeletal -- bodies really have changed during this time period. But the skeletal changes are just the tip of the iceberg -- most of the changes are metabolic, or pathogen-host interaction, or brain development -- things we will never see from the archaeological record.