It’s a common argument of the know-it-all teen, fresh from an introductory biology course: “Life is so cushy now,” he might say, “People aren’t even evolving anymore.” As the argument goes, most people live a decently long life and have a chance to pass on their genes, since we aren’t so often being gobbled up by lions or succumbing to now-curable diseases. With this comes a dampening on the forces of natural selection, and a stagnation, or even weakening, of the human species. But the truth, it seems, couldn’t be more different. Over the past 5 to 10 thousand years, says Nature, reporting on a new study, the genetic diversity in the human population has exploded, a bloom that serves as stage one in the process of evolution. Read more: blogs.smithsonianmag/smartnews/2012/11/humans-have-been-evolving-like-crazy-over-the-past-few-thousand-years/#ixzz2fYhdKPzN Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 19:50:14 +0000
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