Posted on 12/11/2007 12:34:37 AM PST by anymouse
Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday.
In fact, 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, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.
The genetic changes have related to numerous different human characteristics, the researchers said.
Many of the recent genetic changes reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases that became mass killers following the growth of human civilizations, the researchers said.
For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.
The changes have been driven by the colossal growth in the human population -- from a few million to 6.5 billion in the past 10,000 years -- with people moving into new environments to which they needed to adapt, added Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropologist.
"The central finding is that human evolution is happening very fast -- faster than any of us thought," Harpending said in a telephone interview.
"Most of the acceleration is in the last 10,000 years, basically corresponding to population growth after agriculture is invented," Hawks said in a telephone interview.
The research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
FAVORABLE GENE MUTATIONS
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.
Data from this International HapMap Project, short for haplotype mapping, offered essentially a catalogue of genetic differences and similarities in people alive today.
Looking at such data, scientists can ascertain how recently a given genetic change appeared in the genome and then can plot the pace of such change into the distant past.
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. They added that about 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, relatively recent evolution.
Even with these changes, however, human DNA remains more than 99 percent identical, the researchers noted.
Harpending said the genetic evidence shows that people worldwide have been getting less similar rather than more similar due to the relatively recent genetic changes.
Genes have evolved relatively quickly in Africa, Asia and Europe but almost all of the changes have been unique to their corner of the world. This is the case, he said, because since humans dispersed from Africa to other parts of the world about 40,000 years ago, there has not been much flow of genes between the regions.
Well, you are still allowed to contribute to the gene pool. So, find a partner and get busy!
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.- Romans 1:20
Human Evolution Seems to Be Accelerating
(Jews evolved from “financing!”)
AP via Fox News | 12-11-07
Posted on 12/11/2007 11:28:45 AM EST by squireofgothos
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1937908/posts
So, the 7 per cent figure is the fraction of the 1 per cent figure that is not totally identical?
“(I’m SO smart after morning coffee).”
That’s interesting. I’m smarter and funnier after tequila, and tougher, and a better dancer ...
With the ascendancy of messenger RNA, it would seem to be possible for your genome (plus its supporting machinery) to go about the business of rewriting code in order to "adapt" just about as fast as it pleased.
You and I might not agree with the results every time, but we've all had software contractors like that ~
Genes are found along DNA strands. 7% of genes could be rapidly changing with little change in aggregate DNA content. Besides, not all your DNA is composed of genes ~
The more science teaches us about ourselves, the more we see that a higher power has shaped us into what we are.
How did you infer that?
Where do ideas come from? Sometimes, we believe they are God-given. You look at the idea and say “How could I have thought of that?” The famous examples of Kekule’s dream of a snake eating its own tail leading to a fundamental discovery in organic chemistry, Tesla’s flash of insight into how to make what became known as an AC motor. Einstein’s leap into relativity, and many more “dis-joint” ideas are tempting to regard as some form of divine intervention.
His argument though is probably more complicated than that. The notion of God-given insights is just the starting point for a whole body of notions about divine guidance. But, there is the old saying, Man Proposes, God Disposes, in Yiddish, Man Thinks, God Laughs.
How about an ability to rapidly identify and expel common poisonous substances ~ that’s pretty new.
Most of the significant evolutionary pressures concern diseases, both inherited and acquired. Even the dumbest idiot is usually provided some sort of charity/hand-out in most societies. Intelligence needn’t necessarily be a force for evolution as much as the other factors are, in modern human beings. An exception to this would be among small groups of people living nomadic lifestyles, where the size of the group is too small for members to be able to compensate for the shortcomings of other members.
That’s fine, but the problem I have is the fetishtic focus on DNA, without discussion of the influence of methylation, and epigenetics. How these “evolve”, mutate, or get selected by cultural changes in diet, and other matters is a huge scientific void.
Alas, run of the mill Japanese girls are NOT keeping up with the Japanese royal family (who compete nicely with Bavarian girls every single time). Still, in general, they are larger these days.
This says more about me than you but, are you describing bosoms or the ability to consume dark beer?
They drink rice wine ~ so it’s not the beer part eh.
Within the last 350,000 years?
None.
I must be an Eskimo! Cool.... ;)
susie
And it’s a void that’s only going to get bigger when they discover that homosexuality can be UNDONE (through reverse methylation).
More or less.
It doesn't take a 7% change in nucleotide composition to completely change a gene; a single nucleotide change in a 2400 base pair long coding sequence can drastically alter the function of the protein product.
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