Posted on 03/06/2006 7:29:42 PM PST by CobaltBlue
Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans 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. Skip to next paragraph Readers Forum: Human Origins
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 their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement 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 reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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"The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible .... brain function."
How EXCITING! What wonderful news!!! Soon we'll have figured out just why, exactly, those certain people we all know about have such a terrible time thinking at all!!
The key issue in the evolution debate is about speciation. Noting some genetic changes in humans in the past 5000 years is not controversial (I've seen genetic changes in my family in the past two generations).
This stuff gets published as "evidence" of evolution, and I think it is not that at all, unless one defines evolution as "change in the frequency of alleles" which, to my mind, is a definition chosen just because it is indisputable (and therefore too broad to be meaningful).
'Macroevolution' is the one they still can't prove.
Last time I took a college class in evolution, the definition was "a change in gene frequency." Just googled it, and that appears to still be the definition.
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The NYT is proof there has been no evolution in brain function.
Interesting. Thanks.
Because no one can agree on the meaning of the word "prove".
Unfortunately, the brains of creationists haven't evolved...
LOL
YEC INTREP
ttt
I think quite a few have a problem defining "macroevolution" as well
"May," "perhaps," "could," - these are the words of supposition, not science.
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