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: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.