Humans Evolving 100 Times Faster Than Ever

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."

Comments

Time scales

[Dachannien]

A question for Professor Hawks:

An interesting result to be sure, and not far-fetched at all, considering things like Belyaev's silver fox research from the mid-20th century, where artificial selection was shown to greatly accelerate the evolutionary process in terms of behavior.

My question, though, concerns the time scale of accelerated human evolution over the past 10,000 years versus the apparently much faster rate of "evolution" of technology. Some have argued that technological advancements stunt evolutionary change by reducing the severity of natural selection pressures such as the ability to provide food for oneself or to make contact with a mate. (For example, my vision, while corrected to normal levels through the technology of lenses, would have made my chances of reproduction several hundred years ago even lower than they are now.)

Since technology progression has increased to such a fast rate in the past 100 to 200 years, has the rate of technological improvement outstripped the capability of evolutionary processes to keep up? Will we see a decrease in the rate of evolution during very recent history (and, er, future history) due to this increasing difference in time scales, i.e., was the accelerated evolution rate during the past 10,000 years due in part to technological advancement reaching a sort of "sweet spot" that has since been (or will be) surpassed?

Not that any of this will matter once our new robotic overlords take over the planet, but it's still academically interesting.

Re:Not anymore

[QuickFox]

This does not make evolution slower.

Mutations that in earlier times were fatal are now viable. They may now lead to offspring. So these mutations will live on more than before. We have more mutations surviving and spreading, we have more diversity, not less.

Among this diversity, a few will be a leap ahead. Just like we can have a mental genius with a physical disability, who could not survive in an earlier age but can survive today, similarly we can have evolutionary changes that are in some way a leap forward but come combined with disability, able to survive today. Later recombinations through procreation might keep the leap forward while overcoming the disability.

The probability is of course low, but that's the case with all evolution through random mutations. You need long time spans.

With a greater diversity we should have faster evolution.