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

Re:One and the same - nah, I don't buy it.

[petes_PoV]

Mutation is not a "jump in a sequence". It's a new trait.

There is no sequence as there is no "path" that human evolution is following. It's a random selection of those who adapt best to changes in the environment surviving to sexual maturity. Nothing more.

The really interesting question would be: what are we evolving into?

Re:Prof. Hawks, is this evolution evenly distribut

[Henry V .009]

I am sure you are aware of Dr. James Watson's recent controversial assertion that blacks are not as "endowed" intellectually as whites. While the few studies I have seen do not support this conclusion at all I am still curious as to know how evolution has made us different (obviously) in other ways.

You haven't checked out very many studies. Just for grins, why don't you try to find last year's U.S. SAT scores on the internet separated by race (I haven't looked, but I can guess the numbers pretty closely anyway). Or count up the number of black grandmaster chess players, etc., etc. Watson is right, and the people attacking him were jokers. Jason Malloy wrote a great article defending him on GNXP.

Re:Check Out the Sample Size

[alexgieg]

This is what I can't stand about science by press release (and yes, I'm a scientist). Pretty sweeping conclusion drawn from a miniscule sample size.

What I find worse than this is the lack of precision on the terms employed. The word "evolution", for example, usually mean speciation due to genetic variation resulting from adaptation to an environment via natural selection, ant this is what most people understand when they read the word. Thus, if what the article is talking about doesn't have all these characteristics, why employ this word?

Talk all you want about how humans have had lots of genetic variation, show how this is due do adaptive natural selection, if it in fact is, and maybe explain how it can lead to an evolution of the human species by someday causing speciation. But don't say it already is evolution, because it isn't.

Re:No it isn't

[BubFranklin]

How do you determine what a "change" is to include it as an element of rate?

Is there an objective list? Do you vote on it?

It seems that the possibility to determine rate of change over 10,000 years from 270 samples, is a bit far fetched, guess I am a troll.

Re:Check Out the Sample Size

[Plutonite]

You are recording a single event occurance in the flip of a coin. In contrast, you are looking for millions of potentially dependent or conditionally independent occurances when you do a study about something as complex as human DNA changes. 270 people out of billions is not a representative sample size, unless the study is very simplistic. In fact it probably is, and I've RTFA.

it's about the species. GP is right, parent is not

[doug141]

Central to the theory of evolution is speciation. Arguing that changes WITHIN a species is also evolution is a form of, ironically, extrapolation.

The only true measure of rate of evolution is rate of new speciation, like the fossil record shows after mass extinctions.

You might hate the ID argument that scientists haven't documented one species turning into another in real time, but that doesn't make it untrue.