It is interesting to consider how these findings fit into the debate about how early environmental influences may affect human gene expression.
Article Preview
Modern times causing human evolution to accelerate
14 December 2007
David Holzman
New Scientist Magazine issue 2634
Human evolution is speeding up. Around 40,000 years ago our genes began to evolve much faster. By 5000 years ago they were evolving 30 to 40 times faster than ever before and it seems highly likely that we continue to evolve at this super speed today.
Our population explosion and rapidly changing lifestyles seem to be the drivers of this acceleration, the discovery of which contradicts the widely held notion that our technological and medical advances have removed most of the selection pressures acting upon us.
This stunning insight into humanity's development comes from a wide-ranging study of human gene variants gathered by the international HapMap project. Investigators led by John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studied 3.9 million simple differences in DNA called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced "snips") from 270 individuals, including people of Han Chinese, Japanese, Yoruban and northern European extraction. This revealed several pieces ...
The complete article is 1654 words long.
No comments:
Post a Comment