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

adaptation?

[IAR80]

Is that implying evolution? 10,000 years!! I thought Earth is only 7,000 years old. I declare this article a heresy.

Re: adaptation?

[Black Parrot]

Is that implying evolution? No, he was just using big words to say that we're being intelligently redesigned faster than ever.

Re:adaptation?

[Shakrai]

Well, I'm going to look at this from two different sides to try and be fair, but more then likely I'll just wind up pissing everybody off and being modded down all the same ;)

because of it being an essential part of the muslim religion to execute critics

The obvious PC answer to this is that it's also an "essential" part of Judeo-Christianity to stone adulterers to death. I could also point out the various people that have used Christianity as a justification to deny equal rights to gays. Islam also has no history of being used for racial oppression that I'm aware of. Contrast that to Christianity, where many thought (and some extremists still do) that the African race was cursed with the mark of Ham and destined to be servants to the descendants of Japheth (i.e: Europeans).

All of the above is fair criticism of Christianity. But it's also fair to say that modern Christianity seems to be a lot less violent then modern Islam. Consider the fallout over those Danish cartoons. Yes, Islam says that you can't make idols of Muhammad. But that doesn't give you the right to override free speech and force the rest of us to follow your religious restrictions. That would be like Israel trying to tell the rest of the World that we can't eat pork.

Also consider the various death threats and attacks carried out in the name of Muhammad. Do I think this is representative of the whole faith? Certainly not. But it does happen and a lot more often then similar acts (in modern times) conducted in Jesus' name.

In muslim countries it is not an understatement to say that critical opinions will get you killed

You'd have done better to say "in certain muslim countries...." or even "in most muslim countries..." because I can think of at least a few (Turkey comes to mind) where this isn't the case. One would assume that if the Turks have been able to successfully build a secular representative democracy that the rest of the Muslim World will be able to do so sooner or later.

Then again, I don't know enough about the Muslim World to know if they even have democratic leanings and traditions and Turkey could be the exception rather then the rule. The Turks have certainly been influenced by proximity to Europe and have been heavily influenced by Western culture, going all the way back in time to the ancient Greeks. And Western culture has had democratic traditions and practices going all the way back to ancient Athens. Even during the age of kings there were democratic leanings, such as the Magna Carta, the rise of the Common Law, the French revolution, etc, etc.

I suppose only time will tell if secular democracy is compatible with Islam or not. The Western World (*cough* America *cough*) could certainly help it along by treating them less as a source of oil and more as equals. We could certainly help it along by trying to fairly mediate between the Palestinians and Israelis. We could help it along by adopting a non-interventionist foreign policy. They could help it along by renouncing terrorism and violence. They could help it along by understanding some of the concerns on this side of the fence (like why a nuclear armed Iran scares the hell of everybody). They could help it along by understanding why the Western tradition of free speech allows the publication of things they might deem to be offensive or blasphemous.

Bottom line: There seems to be lots of blame to go around on both sides here.

Re:adaptation?

[Shakrai]

If quotes from the quran don't define islam, then what does ?

Ok, let's give that a try and see what happens.

• "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death" (Leviticus 20:9)
• "If a man commits adultery with another man's wife--with the wife of his neighbor--both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death." (Leviticus 20:10)
• "If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl's virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father's house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father's house." (Deuteronomy 22:20-1)
• "Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church." (I Corinthians 14:34-35)
• "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother..." (Matthew 10:34-35)
• "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he [Moses] asked them.... "Now ... kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." (Numbers 31:1-18)
• "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son ... Then shall his father and his mother ... bring him out unto the elders of his city ... And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die." (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
• "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything." (Ephesians 5:22-24)

Do I really need to go on? The point here isn't to trash Christianity either. I'm attempting to point out that Christianity outgrew most of this stuff. One can hope that Islam will do the same and that a small number of violent extremists don't speak for all one billion of it's followers.

Of course, the more I read your posts, the more I'm starting to think that you are probably just a troll. Feel free to prove me wrong by posting something constructive.

Re:adaptation?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

You know, Nietzsche died in an insane asylum.

Just sayin'. ;)

Re:adaptation?

[JavaLord]

"Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church."

Man, I have to start going to church again.

Not anymore

[GeLeTo]

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.

Re:Not anymore

[Yetihehe]

If everybody can have offspring no matter what, it means there is MORE genetic diversity. If people with weaker genes can have their own children, maybe there will be some beneficial mutation in two or three generations? Look how people with higher chance of hemophilia are less likely to suffer from malaria. Not every mutation beneficial in long term may be beneficial in short term and vice versa.

Re:Not anymore

[Tlosk]

Perhaps you don't understand what evolution means, it's simply change. The more change that takes place, the more something has evolved. It doesn't mean better or worse or closer to some ultimate goal.

And what you describe allows lots of evolution to occur. Extremely high selective pressures will punish variability. But when everyone (or almost everyone) can reproduce and selective pressures are low (abundant resources and few dangers) then all those little mutations that would have been selected against get to be passed on to a new generation. Resulting in much faster rates of change over time, as well as much higher variability in the population.

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.

Re:Not anymore

[Rezazur]

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

Re:Not anymore

[Slashidiot]

I do understand that evolution means simply change, and there is no forward or backward change. What I am saying is that some characteristics of individual that were a disadvantage a few thousands of years before, are now an advantage, so the change now happens in the opposite direction of the last few millenia. I'm not judging good and bad, I'm just saying that if conditions happen to move to "more agressive", due to a famine, a plague, or whatever, humankind will be less prepared than 3000 years ago, due to this "backwards evolution".

This is perfectly normal, as conditions have changed, so has humankind, and now humans are worse prepared for some conditions, although better for the ones we have now. Thing is, the conditions we have now are created by humans, and not neccesarily in accordance with the real changes outside civilised areas. Therefore, we have evolved, moved by the conditions we have created, so if we cannot maintain these conditions, we will suddenly be far worse off than if they had never been created.

It is some kind of artificial evolution, that is supported on changes made to the environment, which create more changes on the species, that change environment again. I think up until now, on evolution, environment has never been so much under control of the evolving species. I just don't know how good is that.

I don't know if what I wrote is understandable, I'm not too good with long explanations in english.

Re:Not anymore

[CmdrGravy]

Natural selection doesn't select for good or bad traits just ones which happen to be useful at the time so whilst you think that being short sighted is a negative trait it's not if it doesn't affect your ability to reproduce.

The trouble with your argument is that you are pre supposing that at some point in the future we may no longer be able to manufacture glasses and therefore being shortsighted will be a disadvantage to those individuals affected. Based on that assumption you could implement your plan to guide evolution and prevent short sighted people from reproducing but then when the future turns out to be very different your meddling may well have artificially reduced genetic diversity and impaired our ability to cope with what may be radically different environmental circumstances.

Perhaps global warming will spiral utterly out of control and somehow wreath the world in dense fog eliminating any disadvantage of short sightedness.

Check Out the Sample Size

[dwm]

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.

Re:Check Out the Sample Size

[smallfries]

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?

Re:Check Out the Sample Size

[hansg]

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

Quite an opinion...

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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 evolution

[Harold Halloway]

Not only is human evolution speeding up, but so is self-promotion, apparently.

Millenia of "progress"

[El Yanqui]

OMFG! dat so kewl evolution is da r0xx0r! we r the 1337!!!11 LOLZ

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.

Evolving OR Mutating faster?

[JumperCable]

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.

Re:Evolving OR Mutating faster?

[John Hawks]

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.

No it isn't

[maroberts]

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.

Bad Science

[giafly]

Beneficial genetic changes have appeared at a rate roughly 100 times higher in the past 5,000 years than at any previous period of human evolution, the researchers determined ... but almost all of the changes have been unique to their corner of the world.

There are more gene changes because there are many more people today than 5K years ago. This does not mean that the mutation rate has increased. The speed of evolution is how different the average person today is from the average person back then and nobody has more than a few of these new genes.

people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago

Nonsense. The only way this might be true is if you selectively bred a human with all these recent gene changes. Like the Kwisatz_Haderach out of Dune.

Re:Bad Science

[John Hawks]

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.

Re:PLAGARISM in its worst form

[Arancaytar]

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.)

Re:I dispute your point

[mestar]

Nice post.

"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."

Yes, human intellingence is still being selected for, by sexual selection. It is the women who do the selecting, and they are more choosy than ever. The proof of this could be the fact that people in rich countries have fewer children.

Most of the posts here simply ignore the "sexual selection" part of the evolution. This doesn't make sense, since this could be the 60% of all the reasons for human evolution. In Darwin's work, sexual selection is side by side with "survival of the fittest", but after that it kind of gets ignored, at least until last 20 years.

Human intelligence is basically shaped by sexual selection. Humas/monkeys survived just fine without super intelligence. Human brain is basically a giant sexual ornament, analog to peacock's tail. Many aspects of human intelligence like humor, music, language are a result of sexual selection. "Survival of the fittest" can explain none of those traits. Women always mention "sense of humor" when they talk about desirable men. Being bold might get you killed, being an arrogant rock star will get you laid like, well, a rock star.

Selection for survival and sexual selection are often in conflict. One selects for a trait that the other selects against. Peacock's tail is a giant handicap. However, surviving despite having such a handicap sends a strong message that can't be faked.

Ah, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that by having more humans, and increasing sexual selection pressure, combined makes for a faster human evolution.

Re:I dispute your point

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Can you source this?

I mean, I know that it's "common knowledge" that only the stupid breed, but can you actually source it?

And you have to look more than one generation ahead. If a "stupid" couple have 5 kids can this happen?
- One dies after eating styrofoam
- One ends up in jail
- One ends up on the streets
- One ends up with the slightly-better genes, goes to community college, and scores a reasonably-intelligent wife/husband
- One dumbass knocks up another dumbass and they have 5 more kids

In the end, those 5 kids are a wash - one's genes enter "normal" society, and only one of them carries on the pattern.

I know there are the outlier 15-kid brood-mares out there, but I really do think they are outliers. I'm really not as pessimistic about the future as, say, Idiocracy, because

- Smart people are still having kids, and will continue to have kids. This will not stop (natural selection - the smart people in 20 years will be the offspring of smart people who wanted kids)

- If the pattern does continue to extremes, then the extremely smart will have no problem managing the extremely stupid. Look at how often this happens today (cults, Nigeria scams, televangelists). We may see a decrease in *morals* - particularly towards the dumb - but not in an intelligent caste.

- Carried even further into the future, the extremely-dumb could never take care of themselves on their own. As soon as the extremely-smart decide to stop carrying them, they would be dead by their own incompetence.

Applying it to trolls

[benhocking]

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.

Re:Applying it to trolls

[trolltalk.com]

"I think it does indeed apply to trolls and prist fosters: evolution does not necessarily mean progressit can simply indicate a species adapting to fill a niche."

[X] Hey, I resemble that remark, you ignorant clod!
[X] Its like open source, you "have a niche you want to scratch".
[X] This explains the global obesity epidemic. As supermarket aisles get wider, people evolve to fill that niche.