

Are Humans Still Evolving? - edw519
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091024/hl_time/08599193175700

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tokenadult
The Framingham study is a good study for what it is about (risk factors for
heart disease), but the study is probably inadequate for studying general
selection pressure on the whole human population.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

The key quotations in the article are

Douglas Ewbank, "Those changes we predict for 2409 could be wiped out by
something as simple as a new school-lunch program."

Steve Jones, "Uniquely in the living world, what makes humans what we are is
in our minds, in our society, and not in our evolution."

~~~
motoko
Degenerate diseases don't kill you before you can have children.

"Those changes we predict for 2409 could be wiped out by something as simple
as a new school-lunch program."

Stupid. African nations have both the highest birth rates and the worst
nutrition. If anything, expected good health after reproductive age negatively
correlates with fecundity.

"Uniquely in the living world, what makes humans what we are is in our minds,
in our society, and not in our evolution."

If Steve Jones knows of some supernatural force that excludes the operation of
the human body from physical reality, he should describe that force and submit
it to a physics journal. Otherwise, yes, minds are minds, but minds are not
magic: they're meat.

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motoko
People will look like the people who most have children.

Do you have children? If not, then the people of the future will probably look
less like you and more like the people who compounded faster than you did.

~~~
motoko
"The bastard science of eugenics, [Jones] says, will haunt humanity as long as
people are tempted to confuse evolution with improvement."

"confuse evolution with improvement" I agree.

"bastard science of eugenics" What an appropriate slur: "bastard". Well,
whoever parented that bastard wins this debate ---whatever that debate might
be--- when you and the children you didn't have all die. You can go sit in the
ground with the Quakers and the Spartans.

~~~
mojonixon
Shakers? Quakers are the religious group that prefer the warm fuzzy feelings
to dogma. Shakers were the celibate sect.

~~~
motoko
Don't need to be celibate to go extinct. Remember Nixon? Hoover? They used to
run America from colonial times until... well, know any Quakers?

"Although official Quakerism may not have abided the activities of many of
these feminists, the Quaker belief that "in souls there is no sex," and the
opportunities provided Quaker women to preach, hold meetings, and write
epistles, gave rise to the high percentage of Quakers among the "mothers of
feminism," including Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley,
Susan B. Anthony, and Alice Paul."

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Chi019
Also, the 2007 paper by Hawks et al indicated that evolution had accelerated
over the past 10,000 years.

Dec. 10, 2007 - Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution
is speeding up - and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had
been thought - indicating that humans on different continents are becoming
increasingly different.

"We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly,
and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years,
especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago," says
research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of
anthropology at the University of Utah.

Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published
online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences:

"We aren't the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago," he says, which
may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and
their peaceful Swedish descendants. "The dogma has been these are cultural
fluctuations, but almost any Temperament trait you look at is under strong
genetic influence."

<http://unews.utah.edu/p/?r=120607-1>

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Chi019
There seem to have been some adaptations including central nervous system
genes, which may have increased fitness in a hierarchical agricultural
society.

For example new versions of serotonin transporters in both Europe and east
Asia (such as SLC6A4). There are other neurotransmitter-related changes, also
changes in genes that affect brain development. East Asians have a new version
of DAB1, a gene involved in the development of the layers of the cerebral
cortex, while there is a fairly common new version of NKX2-2 (a brain homeobox
gene) in Europeans.

[http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-
docume...](http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-
document&doi=10.1371%)

[http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030090)

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defdac
I feel stupid now that I noticed there wasn't any cool pictures of arbitrarily
human faces evolving 10 generations - or did I miss something?

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maw
First phrase of just the second sentence:

 _Despite the long-held view that natural selection has ceased to affect
humans because almost everybody now lives long enough to have children_

Uh, what? Do people actually think that?

~~~
callahad
Well, A 2006 report on global mortality rates [1] suggests that regardless of
country, the average human does reach sexual maturity. It follows that
fitness, amongst humans, isn't significantly affected by survival / longevity.
After all, if we live to reproduce, then anything that sets in after that
event is irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint.

I could see that reasoning giving rise to the phrasing used in the article.

[1]: <http://www.who.int/whosis/whostat2006_mortality.pdf>

~~~
jcl
_After all, if we live to reproduce, then anything that sets in after that
event is irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint._

I imagine there are some people who reason that way, but they'd be ignoring
the obvious survival benefits of having parents (and extended family) to help
raise a child.

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tocomment
I'm thinking resistance to birth control is going to evolve really fast,
probably within a few generations. Or perhaps if there's a gene associated
with forgetting to take birth control.

~~~
scott_s
Interesting idea, but I think most mutations that would so severely change how
a woman responds to hormones would also be debilitating to the point that she
wouldn't be able to have children.

~~~
rsheridan6
There are already lots of fertile girls who have adverse reactions to hormonal
contraceptives.

~~~
scott_s
But then they know the pill doesn't work, and will likely use a different form
of birth control. In order for the mutation to spread, it would need to make
the pill not work silently. And even that would be difficult, because women
should realize the pill is not working because they're still menstruating.

~~~
coolnewtoy
women on the pill still menstruate

~~~
scott_s
Only if they do the 3 weeks on, 1 week off cycle that is commonly prescribed.
Women who continue to take the hormone pills can skip menstruation.

Related to the current discussion, women would quickly realize that their
menstrual cycle is not lining up with the week of non-hormone pills.

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StrawberryFrog
You cannot stop evolution, you can only change the fitness criteria.

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AndrewDucker
What, no cyber-eyes and metal arms? I'd like to sign up for a different future
please!

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req2
Can someone hook edw519 up with searchyc.com?

It seems all he does is post dups:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=891137>

