Ouroboros

Researchers: Human evolution speeding up

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Mon Dec 10, 6:02 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Science fiction writers have suggested a future Earth populated by a blend of all races into a common human form. In real life, the reverse seems to be happening. People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.

"I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed," explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "The opposite seems to be true."

"Our species is not static," Harpending added in a telephone interview.

That doesn't mean we should expect major changes in a few generations, though, evolution occurs over thousands of years.

Harpending and colleagues looked at the DNA of humans and that of chimpanzees, our closest relatives, they report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If evolution had been proceeding steadily at the current rate since humans and chimps separated 6 million years ago there should be 160 times more differences than the researchers found.

That indicates that human evolution had been slower in the distant past, Harpending explained.

"Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation," the study says. "The past 10,000 years have seen rapid skeletal and dental evolution in human populations, as well as the appearance of many new genetic responses to diet and disease."

And they found that different changes are occurring in Africans, Asians and Europeans.

Most anthropologists agree that humans first evolved in Africa and then spread to other areas, and the lighter skin color of Europeans and Asians is generally attributed to selection to allow more absorption of vitamin D in colder climate where there is less sun.

The increase in human population from millions to billions in the last 10,000 years accelerated the rate of evolution because "we were in new environments to which we needed to adapt," Harpending adds. "And with a larger population, more mutations occurred."

In another example, the researchers noted that in China and most of Africa, few people can digest fresh milk into adulthood. Yet in Sweden and Denmark, the gene that makes the milk-digesting enzyme lactase remains active, so almost everyone can drink fresh milk, explaining why dairy farming is more common in Europe than in the Mediterranean and Africa, Harpending says.

The researchers studied 3.9 million gene snippets from 270 people in four populations: Han Chinese, Japanese, Africa's Yoruba tribe and Utah Mormons who traced their ancestry to northern Europe.

Richard Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said he thinks the researchers reasoning regarding rapid adaptive change is plausible.

The study mainly points to an overall expansion in the human population over the past 40,000 years to explain the genetic data.

"Yet the archaeological record also shows that humans increasingly divided themselves into distinct cultures and migrating groups — factors that seem to play only a small role in their analysis. Dividing the human population into finer units and their movement into new regions — the Arctic, Oceania, tropical forests, just to name some — may have also forced quicker adaptive evolution in our species," Potts said.

Potts, who was not part of the research team, added that he liked the report "because it points to how genetic data can be used to test a variety of ideas about recent human adaptation."

Two years ago Harpending and colleague Gregory M. Cochran published a study arguing that above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews — those of northern European heritage — resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors.

Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes, they suggested. That evolution also is linked to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher in Jews.

The new study was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the Unz Foundation, the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin.

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The_Heretic

This assumes that the gene would've shut off anyway even with dairy included in the diet from an early age, which no one's succesfully demonstrated.

This lends itself to ignoring cultural leanings to induce intelligence, rather than innate. Even those who didn't score a lot of wealth would still survive well into adulthood and still have childred, ergo not be removed from the genepool.

We'll see how these three hold in their opinion after there's a real president [if we get one] appointing experts there.

__________________

John McCain: "He's in Iraq... with a few centuries to kill."





You won't fight for the Bill of Right? Fine! I won't fight for you in the ballot box!

jowey

Interesting - wait till we hit Space or even the Oceans.....

But now the socially aware are not breeding as much, yet the poor continue to propagate. Therefore there may be a trend towards regression and aggression - war and then we go again.

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The_Heretic

There is a strong argument that our drive to overpopulate is to increase genetic diversity after the huge bottle necking event we underwent some 70,000 years ago.

However, just because the poor populate as much or more than anyone else shouldn't automatically mean regression. See, we don't know enough about what's best for our own evolution to say who should and shouldn't repreduce. Sickle Cell Anemia saved, and continues to save the lives of people who otherwise would die from maleria. Today's genetic defect may save your descendant's ass. We just don't know.

However, I'm betting there's a population threshhold after which we suffer a somewhat locust effect, where our mass behavior causes either an unconscious and irresistable urge to migrate or- alternatively, become more sociopathic.

__________________

John McCain: "He's in Iraq... with a few centuries to kill."





You won't fight for the Bill of Right? Fine! I won't fight for you in the ballot box!

gorillamom

One reason the poor breed so much is they get Welfare money. The reason they do this is because they are uneducated or lazy. The middle class can't afford to breed, and the upper class don't want their time taken up with raising kids. At least in America.

__________________

The Clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power,
To tell just when the hands will stop
On what day or what hour.
Now is the only time we have,
So live it with a will,
Don't wait until tomorrow,
The hands may then be still.

The_Heretic

Not so sure about that as a univeral truism even in this country. One of the big reasons anywhere in the world the poor have many children is because that's the only retire plan many impoverished people have. In addition, with child mortality rates higher they have to assume some of their children won't suvive to adulthood.

__________________

John McCain: "He's in Iraq... with a few centuries to kill."





You won't fight for the Bill of Right? Fine! I won't fight for you in the ballot box!

gorillamom

That's true as well. But I was refering to here in the US specifically. We also have a high infant mortality rate for a Westernized country.

__________________

The Clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power,
To tell just when the hands will stop
On what day or what hour.
Now is the only time we have,
So live it with a will,
Don't wait until tomorrow,
The hands may then be still.

The_Heretic

Because we're blind to poverty within our own country.

I distinctly recall many people on the Bill Maher boards having a profound dislike of the movie Chronicals of Riddick, but Jowey does bring up an interesting point about human evolution on other worlds. In Chronicals of Riddick this future speciation is inferred. Riddick himself is a "Furion," a "native" of the planet Furia, which apparenly is a rough neighborhood as far as extra-solar boispheres go. The movie's action sequences would have no basis in reality otherwise.

Another character is an "Elemental" of the airvarety in particular. Their brains have become highly attuned and- possibly, it's their minds that allow them to glide without aerofoils and to bend light around herself if there's enough direct light on her [nearly equal to daylight sun]. But most impressive, to me anyway, was their ability to "calculate" and I don't just mean do basic math or probability in their head. I'm make assessments they couldn't possibly have drawn date from.

"Is Riddick dead?"

"I calculate a 73% probability... that Riddick is still alive."

Some of this future evolution will be artificial I promise you that. The potential capabilities written into our DNA are just too tempting to some people. And since a group of people conforming to a certain ideology would have the opportunity to establish their own world far away from those who disapprove of their beliefs or methods. Here on Earth if you want to genetically engineer a human being or other organisms there's either a lawe forbidding it or a case pending in the courts to challenge such research.

But in a far flung future with limitless real estate just waiting for true pioneers such as was rarely seen on Earth [the Americas already had residence before European arrival] if the society you lived in disapproved of your proposed social structure or synthesized anatomy or physiology they'd simply send you off or you'd choose to split the scene. And the change of return violence diminishes due to the lack of interest or value in waging war across such distances. You won't be fighting for new land, because there'd be countless empty worlds.

So pity the retard dumb enough to think they could unite so many worlds under one rule. A multi-world socio-political structure is pheasable, but not across many solar systems- at leat not for the next few millennia. So if you have the technology to skip town, skip out of this solar system then more power to'ya. And it'd way too much trouble to chase after you, track you down to then wipe you out. This further encourages differentiation of social structures, technological paths unique to each world or system and- eventually/inevitably, still more rapid speciation.

Even for those humans who resist any intentional change will evolve naturally due to the basic fact no two planets will have exactly matching environments. Even with the 70/21 nitrogen/oxygen mix at about one atmosphere at sea level [or equivalent thereto] and nearly one gee doesn't mean all else is equal to Earth. Basic chemistry on that new world will slightly off- at a minimum, radioisotopes will have differing percentages and if it has indigenous life on it humans won't be ecological or biochemically compatible to it. The proteins [assuming those lifeforms have protein incorporated into their nature] won't be anything like those of Earth organisms. This is again due to evolution. Never the same thing twice or, as Christopher Columbus would say, life has more imagination than our dreams.

Hell, give it a million years of human evolution on other worlds and they will be effectively extraterrestrially alien to anything known to humans today.

__________________

John McCain: "He's in Iraq... with a few centuries to kill."





You won't fight for the Bill of Right? Fine! I won't fight for you in the ballot box!

jowey

It is imperative that we make the steps to expand before this civilization recycles and loses the ability to make the leap.

Just imagine a human that evolves in zero gravity, would an octopus be more comfortable in that environment ?

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The_Heretic

Yeah, to become the trailer trash of the milky way, "Ohh shit! It's those rimbillies again. Fuckin' spacecraft looks like a bunch of sodapop cans glued together. They're all braggin' about crossing 450 lightyears in a week, and all I can think is, 'Wow, traffic must've stunk.'"

According to first novels I wrote they are the ideal astronaut. No bones to decalcify, they have a far better sense of orientation in three dimentional space, they can hold onto something with just one point of contact [with the right design pressuresuit the magnetic pads would be activated by a control fitted to their suckers] and they have innate understanding of EVA movement.

__________________

John McCain: "He's in Iraq... with a few centuries to kill."





You won't fight for the Bill of Right? Fine! I won't fight for you in the ballot box!