Spring Break
Modern life's pressures may be hastening human evolution
Robert S. Boyd-MCT Campus
Issue date: 4/17/09 Section: News
"Any gene variant that increases your chance of having children early and often should be favored," Cochran said in an e-mail message.
This is the process of "natural selection," which Charles Darwin proposed 150 years ago and is still the heart of modern evolutionary theory.
Despite modern medical and technological advances, the pressures that lead to evolution by natural selection have continued.
The massive AIDS epidemic that's raging in southern Africa, for example, is "almost certainly" causing gene variants that protect against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to accumulate in the African population, Harpending said.
When he was asked how many genes currently are evolving, Harpending replied: "A lot. Several hundred at least, maybe over a thousand."
Another anthropologist, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, "Our evolution has recently accelerated by around 100-fold."
A key reason, Hawks said, is the enormous growth of the world's population, which multiplies the size of the gene pool available to launch new varieties.
"Today, beneficial mutation must be happening far more than ever before, since there are more than 6 billion of us," Cochran said.
The changes are so rapid that "we could, in the very near future, compare the genes of old people and young people" to detect newly evolving genes, Cochran said. Skeletons from a few thousand or even a few hundred years ago also might provide evidence of genetic change.
"Human evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern humans appeared or when they expanded out of Africa," Harpending said. "It never stopped."
This is the process of "natural selection," which Charles Darwin proposed 150 years ago and is still the heart of modern evolutionary theory.
Despite modern medical and technological advances, the pressures that lead to evolution by natural selection have continued.
The massive AIDS epidemic that's raging in southern Africa, for example, is "almost certainly" causing gene variants that protect against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to accumulate in the African population, Harpending said.
When he was asked how many genes currently are evolving, Harpending replied: "A lot. Several hundred at least, maybe over a thousand."
Another anthropologist, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, "Our evolution has recently accelerated by around 100-fold."
A key reason, Hawks said, is the enormous growth of the world's population, which multiplies the size of the gene pool available to launch new varieties.
"Today, beneficial mutation must be happening far more than ever before, since there are more than 6 billion of us," Cochran said.
The changes are so rapid that "we could, in the very near future, compare the genes of old people and young people" to detect newly evolving genes, Cochran said. Skeletons from a few thousand or even a few hundred years ago also might provide evidence of genetic change.
"Human evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern humans appeared or when they expanded out of Africa," Harpending said. "It never stopped."
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