Posted on 10/05/2011 4:18:19 AM PDT by 1010RD
Even in relatively modern societies, humans are still changing and evolving in response to their environment, new research indicates.
The study was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found a genetic push toward younger age at first reproduction and larger families while studying an island population in Quebec. The study used data from 30 families who settled on île aux Coudres, located in the St. Lawrence River outside of Quebec City, between 1720 and 1773.
The researchers analyzed the data from women who married between 1799 and 1940, comparing their family relationships, any social, cultural or economic differences, and the age at which they had their first child. Researchers found that over 140 years, the age at first reproduction dropped from 26 to 22.
The University of Quebec geneticist Emmanuel Milot and colleagues who did the study have reported that though "it is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection, this study supports the idea that humans are still evolving.”
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"What we learn from that population is that evolution is possible in relatively modern times in modern humans," Milot said. "Where it is going to occur and in what ways is a different question."
The study has noted that results show that microevolution can be detectable over relatively few generations in humans and underscore the need for studies of human demography and reproductive ecology to consider the role of evolutionary processes.
Here’s a handy test to determine if someone is evolved/evolving: ask them if they like karaoke..............better test is ask them if they are liberal.
Our understanding of pre-EBIDs has been pushed back beyond anything known by the finding........See more in the book,
“Did Not Knowing How to Polka Kill the Neanderthals?”
Oh, I know, but that doesn’t mean anyone else has to fall for it.
Yeah, there are way too many holes in the methodology for this to be taken seriously. All human populations respond to stress with changes in breeding patterns. This isn’t evolution, it’s built-in to our design. War, disease, famine, will all lead to increased birth rates, and none of those are examples of evolution, so why would anyone consider this an example?
Laz.... you are hysterical! I especially like the one that reads, “I can see up your skirt..” You know that some woman would read that tombstone and actually take several steps backwards. LOL!!
I read once where evolution explains my wife's shopping habits and even the concept of G-d was an evolutionary result to promote survival.
What’s this 1999 stuff? Is Laz really 12 years old? What a horn dog for that age, shouldn’t get his parents permission to be on this forum?
You can sleep easy knowing this... your MIL was right (well, at least at the end of her life). She was sick (even if it was only for that one time). LOL!
I'm an early bloomer.
Remove mrotality and provide free resources, and any population will, genetically or otherwise, shift towards a more r-selected reproductive strategy - avoid competition, mate early, mate promiscuously, and perform low investment child rearing.
It can only go on for so long, though, since there are not unlimited resources. Eventually resources will become limited, competition will enter the arena by necessity, and the population will shift to a more K-selected strategy. Unpleasant, but also unavoidable.
The bottom line is, even with man’s mastery of technology, he can’t produce the infintely supplied level of unlimited resources necessary to permanantly make r-selection a competitive advantage. Sooner or later nature will balance the scale with a sufficient level of harshness to restore evolutionary advancement.
Long before our world looks like the world in the movie Idiocracy, there would be a period of diminshed resources which would cull the r-selecteds through the necessary competition required to survive, and restore the balance to our species.
This study is just what one would expect in any species which saw abundant resources and limited competition for a short period.
“They’ve been able to show empiracally that if a species moves from a high death rate to a lower death rate, the number of births they give will also drop.”
r/K Selection theory. High mortality equals rejection of competition, early mating, promiscuous mating, and low investment single parenting. r-selection.
Low Mortality produces an embrace of competition, later mating, monogamy, and high investment two-parent child rearing. K-selection.
It is the evolutionary origin of our political ideologies.
“The smarter the woman, on average the fewer children she will likely have. The result is a growing gender gap. Women will become increasingly less intelligent than men.”
That’s not correct logic. Women bear both male and female children in roughly equal numbers, so there won’t be any gender gap caused by this phenomenon, just increasingly less intelligent people of both sexes.
“Another example of how the ToE is the omni-theory that explains everything.”
Right on. I could write a paper describing how evolutionary forces made the discovery of the theory of evolution inevitable, and they’d probably give me the Nobel Prize.
Glen Miller evolved into the Beatles.
I worked for a few years in the department of a hospital that oversees all of the medical research going on there. I hate to say it, but that study is pretty typical of what passes for research. I've seen the same pattern repeated so many times I could scream, both in studies done at our hospital, and in study reports I read in medical journals. They go through records and enumerate certain data that they find. Then they enter the data into a statistical program (or have the statistician analyze it). They come up with correlations between the various data sets. They go on to conclude all sorts of things about the correlations that aren't supported by even the flimsiest shred of evidence. And the study gets published.
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