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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."
Is that implying evolution? 10,000 years!! I thought Earth is only 7,000 years old. I declare this article a heresy.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Rapid evolution in the past 10000 years - maybe. In the past 50 years - no way. Nowdays everybody can have an offspring no matter what diseases, diets or social changes he is subjected to.
From the article:
The researchers looked for the appearance of favorable gene mutations over the past 80,000 years of human history by analyzing voluminous DNA information on 270 people from different populations worldwide. (Emphasis mine)
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.
I've been reading Slashdot for a long time, and let me just say that our study doesn't necessarily apply to trolls.
The irony of this statement is overwhelming.
Not only is human evolution speeding up, but so is self-promotion, apparently.
OMFG! dat so kewl evolution is da r0xx0r! we r the 1337!!!11 LOLZ
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
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.
Are we really evolving faster, or are we, as a population experiencing a higher rate of mutations? Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable.
I thought evolution, didn't occur until selective environmental pressure, weeded out the non-favorable traits. I really don't *think* that happening at a higher rate. I suspect we just have a giant gene pool with a lot of variability.
So which is it John? Are we mutating faster or evolving faster?
P.S. Fascinating work. Kudos.
You come down under my bridge and say that!
Blank until
Evolution is most likely encouraged by viruses. The reason is that they will grab a snippet from one person (and other entity), and insert it into our genomes. Almost certainly we have only found a fraction of these viruses, and will find more once we start looking in the right places. The interesting thing is that as we get denser in terms of population, I believe it will increase even faster. Likewise, we will see interesting issues such as general increase in miscarriages (incompatable genes being spread around).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You have the concept of "backwards"... um... backwards. Backward evolution means that you become less adapted to your surroundings, and are less likely to survive. It doesn't aim for some lofty ideal of perfection, where anorexia will kill you, and all our survival mechanisms are aesthetically pleasing.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
A rate of change of distance is velocity. A rate of change of velocity is acceleration.
Evolution is how many changes are occuring over a period of time. You can measure a rate of evolution, i.e. whether the number of changes over time is increasing or decreasing.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Reduce, reuse, cycle
It's not true! It's just that God has been intelligently re-designing us at a higher rate.
that selection pressure has decreased. People have *fewer* children since the invention of industry and medicine, not more. Virtually all industrialized nations including the US reproduce at or below replacement rate. Immigration is largely what keeps populations from dipping, and countries that lack significant immigration do see decreases in population.
It is true that people are dying young less, but that doesn't mean that selection pressure has decreased, it has just changed.
Think about what sort of basis people are allowed to reproduce on now, and ask yourself what the likely outcomes are. There are a number of factors. People who are too uneducated or dumb to practice birth control are reproducing at a significantly higher rate than the educated population. People who are more physically attractive are more likely to find mates in general. Now that second point isn't really a problem as attractiveness is connected to health. However, let's look at the things that are no longer selected for.
While in the past people with wealth and power tended to be selected for, and poor families tended to slowly die off, especially in feudal societies, this is no longer true as the wealthy tend to be educated and thus practice birth control. This might be good from a social justice picture, but it also means that intelligence has virtually no way of being selected for any more. After all, if intelligence didn't select for itself by helping to acquire wealth in human society, how did it select for itself?
The main question is now, is intelligence in any way still being selected for? If it isn't, then it seems likely that there will be a backwards slide in human intelligence until the situation changes.
Careful, now you've revealed the Secrets of Scientology. Raving cultists will come after you. :P
(Unless you're a raving cultist yourself. Er... I have somewhere else to be, quickly.)
In terms of number of selected variants, the three populations in the HapMap are quite similar -- each has around 3000 new selected variants by our measures. Few of these are shared, because these recent things haven't had time to spread. Of the things that aren't shared, some of them probably have parallel phenotypic effects.
For example, skin pigmentation genes causing lighter skin in Europeans are largely different from those in East Asians, even though they have the same general effect. Still, some specific effects, like hair pigmentation, may be quite different.
Other genes respond to selection pressures that have historically been very different. Malaria is a huge source of selection in African populations historically, but it was much less important in Europeans, for example.
As far as behavioral variations, the fact is that we don't know what most genetic changes may do. So we certainly can't say that some populations have undergone more or less behavioral change than others. Most of these changes are genetically very simple, so we're not looking at any kind of radically new changes in phenotype -- no growing antlers. The same would be true of any kind of behavioral changes under selection.
Ok, so maybe we are mutating faster, or there are more of us around so there are more mutations, etc. But as I understand: evolution = random mutation + non-random selection. Right now it seems there is no selection at all. Even the impotent and infertile can reproduce now. Unless one gets killed before they become a teen they'll most likely reproduce.
I think it does indeed apply to trolls and prist fosters: evolution does not necessarily mean progress—it can simply indicate a species adapting to fill a niche.
Ben Hocking
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