You may have read pieces here and there that proclaim human evolution has ground to a halt. One reason given is that we're preventing many causes of death that used to select out the less fit among us.
John Derbyshire has a contrary view, and cites this as evidence.
Another sensational genetics paper from the Henry Harpending/Greg Cochran team. (They did that paper on the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence three years ago.)
Among their claims, which are based on some careful data-mining of the HapMap:
Human beings are evolving rapidly.
"We aren’t the same [i.e. biologically] as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago."
Our evolution may be accelerating.
Human races have evolved away from each other, getting more different, and this is still going on: "We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity."
Over the past 5,000 years, new genetic variants have been emerging at a rate 100 times faster than in any other period of human evolution.
If you ever wondered how those wild, bloodthirsty Vikings turned into the hygienic, pacifistic Swedes of today, there's your answer: biology. A great many longstanding conundrums about human nature are turning out to have that same answer.
Given reproduction and variation, you have evolution. And evolution is always going to happen faster than you expect it to.
It's true for nanotech, and it's true for Humans. The only way to keep humans from evolving is to kill them.
No comments:
Post a Comment