Many people mistakenly believe that evolution is no longer
happening in humans. That we have reached the end of our evolution and the
species is now stagnate. But this is in no way true! Evolution is still at work
and this article in the New York Times is an elucidating report on how mankind
has been changing and why it has been changing.
One of the examples they used was “Asian Flush.” When people
in China discovered that they could convert cereal into liquor, drunkenness
must have posed a threat to their survival. As a result a variant gene that
protects agains alchol became prevalent in almost all of China as rice
cultivation became universal. The gene transforms the intoxicating effect of
alcohol to a chemical that makes people flush. This is an example of how
cultural changes are shaping evolution. This population responded on the
molecular level to changes in their local environment. East Asians have a
genetic variant absent from European and African populations of having thicker
hair. This presumably is to help protect themselves from the cold.
A government project called the Hap Map s a way of seeing
the force of natural selection across the whole human genome. This is meant to
discover the root and patterns of disease/ But it also provides the DNA data to
see where evolution is occurring. It appears from data that 13% of our genes
have been shaped by recent evolution! Evolution has not reached a standstill,
and as our environment continues to rapidly change so will we!
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