December 11, 2007

Humans Evolving Faster

Posted by Eric at 8:07 pm | Category: Biology, Links, Literature

In an interesting paper by John Hawks which has been making waves, HapMap studies have found that the evolutionary rate in humans has accelerated over the last 40,000 years or so, starting from the middle of the last Ice Age which ended about 10,000 years ago.

Pretty cool stuff! John Hawks has a pretty brief explanation on his blog, but Razib has a much more extensive explanation at Gene Expression which helps to tease out the population genetics involved in understanding the HapMap human genetic variation data.

Human population genetics is an amazing thing, both for medicine and for understanding our societies. Anthropology of this kind is cool!

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2 Responses to “Humans Evolving Faster”

  1. cmb Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    HA!

    I told you so. Also? TOTALLY A SCIENCE.
    Because its finals week here I have yet to read this paper, but when I do I’ll tell you what I think.

  2. Eric Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    You told me that anthropology is interesting? Perhaps, but note that I like this mainly because it’s genomic, not going into the field and looking at fossils and such. Plus, it uses mathematics, while a lot of biological anthropology seems to be just counting….and maybe taking standard deviations.

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