# Humans Are Still Evolving!



## heartoflesh (Mar 7, 2006)

Nicholas Wade, New York Times

Scientists offer strong evidence that humans are still evolving
Their detection of genes reshaped by natural selection may help explain why people have a such a variety of appearances.

Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned hunting and gathering for settlements and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.

Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny.

Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.

The study of selected genes may help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have a such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole very similar, said Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic project of the National Geographic Society.

The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.

"There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study. He and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLoS-Biology, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization.


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Mar 7, 2006)

More recent evidence of the link between the sin gene and the stupidity gene. 

Family May Provide Evolution Clue


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## heartoflesh (Mar 7, 2006)

> _Originally posted by VirginiaHuguenot_
> More recent evidence of the link between the sin gene and the stupidity gene.
> 
> Family May Provide Evolution Clue



Thanks Andrew, I needed that laugh!!  Good to see you posting, haven't seen much from you lately.


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## smhbbag (Mar 7, 2006)

I guess I don't see why it would be a problem for a young-earth creationist to accept this study's results.

This is textbook microevolution within a species - no different than evolution accounting for the certain differences in dogs or changes in the majority of wing colors within a species of moth. It's change over time - thus 'evolution' is an appopriate label for it. But nothing in this study can be used as support for human evolution from a subhuman species.



> The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.



Small things change depending on who breeds with whom (because a certain trait is either attractive/unattractive/helpful/hurtful) and who dies off without reproducing because of something genetic. Small traits vary over time, and this is something we all accept. But as soon as it's called "evolution" by a bunch of Evolutionists, we must automatically discard it?


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