move over monkeys

[Blayz]

Evolution getting faster by the millennium


http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/...2007/12/11/1197135461835.html?s_cid=rss_world

NATURE'S race to create the perfect person has shifted into top gear, with humans evolving 100 times faster than at any time since the rise of man some 6 million years ago...

The pace of human evolution in the past 5000 years was "immense … something nobody expected", John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist, said yesterday.
His team found evidence that 1800 genes, or 7 per cent of all those in the human body, had undergone natural selection in the past 5000 years. "We are more different genetically from people living 5000 years ago than they were from Neanderthals," said Professor Hawks. "In the last 40,000 years humans have changed as much as they did in the previous 2 million years....

 

[Caitlin.ann]

Woah, thats pretty neat!

 

[madarab]

I'll take the blue hair and ability to produce vitamin C please.

I'd heard previously about brain development genes that seemed to be spreading through the human population. I wonder what the actual effects of some of the new genes are.

 

[treesinthebreeze]

I was thinking the other day that what people called nerds and geeks in the 80s/90s are more common place now. People are more likely to accept each other for who they are, well except for the religious people that like to ride around on their moral high horse. I think we have definately evolved enormously over the past 20 years in a social way.

 

[AV1611VET]

NATURE'S race to create the perfect person has shifted into top gear, with humans evolving 100 times faster than at any time since the rise of man some 6 million years ago...

Sounds like the headlines of a 1935 newspaper.

 

[[serious]]

Dude, if that's a nazi reference I call Godwin's law.

 

[AV1611VET]

Dude, if that's a nazi reference I call Godwin's law.

LOL --- I was wondering if anyone was gonna call Godwin on me.

 

[sfs]

Not a very strong paper, I'm afraid. I have no trouble believing that positive selection has been unusually frequent in humans in the last 50,000 years, both because of larger populations and because of new environmental pressures, but I don't see this paper as doing much to support that hypothesis. They use a weak test for selection (one of the weakest tests in its class), and simply assume that all candidate regions above some threshold are real instances of selection, without doing any simulation to assess their false positive rate or their robustness under departures from their model. They do cite an earlier paper as evidence that their test is robust (written by some of the same authors), but the simulations in that paper are quite weak themselves. The current paper also simply assumes that estimates of the age of selective sweeps, which inherently have large errors, are always correct.

The paper is also kind of sloppy. For example, it makes the statement, "The number of ASVs detected encompasses some 7% of human genes and is consistent with the proportion found in another survey using a related approach (12)." Technically, the statement is true, since the paper cited as reference 12 (Voight et al) makes no estimate at all of the proportion of genes that have been under selection, but that's probably not what they meant. Two sentences later, the authors write, "Many human genes are now known to have strongly selected alleles in recent historical times, such as lactase (17, 18), CCR5 (19, 20), and FY (21)." Two of these genes are indeed known to have been under strong selection (that is, there is very good evidence for selection there), but this isn't true for CCR5. One of the two papers that they cite for CCR5 actually dismantles the case for selection at that gene, rather than supports it; as far as I know, there has been no refutation of that paper (which includes one of the original proponents of selection at CCR5 as a senior author). You're really supposed to look at the papers you cite.

 

[InTheCloud]

But is that is true who is doing the natural selection?
A can bet those genes changes must be related to diseases borne from domesticated animals. And the diseases are doing the natural selection.

 

[AlHailThePowerOfJesusName]

Sounds like a tabloid.


why can't I fly? or have lazers in my eyes like cyclops?

 

[Vene]

Sounds like a tabloid.


why can't I fly? or have lazers in my eyes like cyclops?

We can, in a plane. We can't fly using our bodies because we are too heavy and don't have wings. I don't know what a "lazer" is, maybe you mean laser. The reason for that is X-men are fictional.

 

[MrBoo]

The pace of human evolution in the past 5000 years was "immense … something nobody expected", John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist, said yesterday.

Seems interesting that they can find such a distinction occurring in humans beginning 5000 years ago when that is the approximate time between the Fall and the Flood.

Although 'something nobody expected' is wrong. Biblical Creationists expect major differences to be between humans determined to be less than 6-10 thousand years and 'humans' thought to be older.

 

[RichardT]

Creationists have been saying this for a while now.

 

[Blayz]

Not a very strong paper

There's a paper? Does it have a link?

 

[Blayz]

Although 'something nobody expected' is wrong. Biblical Creationists expect major differences to be between humans determined to be less than 6-10 thousand years and 'humans' thought to be older.

Indeed. For example, Biblical creationists would expect 'humans' more than 6000 years old to not exist. That's a pretty big difference.

 

[Blayz]

Creationists have been saying this for a while now.

What a pity 'saying' is all they ever do, they never provided any evidence. Once again they collect the crumbs from the table of science, not having the wit to organise their own.

 

[gamespotter10]

Sounds like the headlines of a 1935 newspaper.

sounds like you took that out of context

 

[Exhausted]

sounds like you took that out of context

Hilariously so.

 

[sfs]

There's a paper? Does it have a link?

There is a paper (in PNAS), but as of this morning it didn't seem to be online yet. I got a copy from a friend who got it from another friend who got it from a reporter. PNAS tends to be a little slow getting things online.

 

[TeddyKGB]

Seems interesting that they can find such a distinction occurring in humans beginning 5000 years ago when that is the approximate time between the Fall and the Flood.

Although 'something nobody expected' is wrong. Biblical Creationists expect major differences to be between humans determined to be less than 6-10 thousand years and 'humans' thought to be older.

My guess is their "immense" and your "immense" are two decidedly different things. For starters, theirs probably does not posit a genetic bottleneck of 8 individuals.