Then one day, as Hawks and Cochran mulled over the matter in a phone conversation, inspiration struck. “At exactly the same moment, both of us realized, gee, there’s a lot more people on the planet in recent times,” Hawks recalls. “In a large population you don’t have to wait so long for the rare mutation that boosts brain function or does something else desirable.”
Human races are evolving away from each other. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single mixed humanity.
NVDL: Who would've thought. In a way it makes sense - as stress increases we become less alike as we 'adapt'. As conditions become more benign we become more similar. Question is, is it true that in recent times our stresses have become more? I'd say the answer is yes, based on more and more people coming into comcpetition with each other for less and less.
So to suggest that humans have undergone an evolutionary makeover from Stone Age times to the present is nothing short of blasphemous. Yet a team of researchers has done just that. They find an abundance of recent adaptive mutations etched in the human genome; even more shocking, these mutations seem to be piling up faster and ever faster, like an avalanche. Over the past 10,000 years, their data show, human evolution has occurred a hundred times more quickly than in any other period in our species’ history.
The new genetic adaptations, some 2,000 in total, are not limited to the well-recognized differences among ethnic groups in superficial traits such as skin and eye color. The mutations relate to the brain, the digestive system, life span, immunity to pathogens, sperm production, and bones—in short, virtually every aspect of our functioning.
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