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- Hacker News
- The idea that humans have undergone high selective pressure for genes related to immunity in some way during a recent 5000 year period in which massive urbanization lead to a truly unfathomable amount of deaths including staggering percentages of humans dying in childhood because of various infectious diseases, plagues, pandemics, etc, and that those changes involved large numbers of small changes across a large number of genes in complex regulatory networks, is probably the least surprising discovery in the history of the universe. It's good science and it's obviously important research to do, not in the least because it can shed light on evolutionary pressures that may be driving the rise in autoimmune diseases we see in the modern day, but the framing of the PR slop article around it is truly so stupid.
Maybe if it found selective pressures were still dominating and driving evolution in recent decades in developed nations with low childhood mortality that would be surprising. Though the framing of the article is almost that it would be surprising if mutations were happening at all which is obviously stupid - we haven't figured out how to reverse entropy so mutation rates haven't gone down, evolution by genetic drift is obviously continuing to occur, and with advances in medicine the number of folks surviving with mutations that would have been problematic otherwise is increasing.
Truly disappointing slop. Like obviously humans faced selective pressures during an era when like 8 in 10 kids died of plague or similar things, a biological factor where survival is correlated with genetic factors that influence immunity and disease survival.
Again, super useful science to see exactly what that influence was, but it would only be surprising if we learned we'd somehow managed to turn off entropy and statistics during the black death and we didn't face selective pressures.
by vikramkr - The most terrifying evolutionary trend is that nowadays fertility is negatively correlated with intelligence. That is, there is a strong selective pressure for humans to become dumber.by cubefox
- Isn't this obvious? Why on earth would it stop? I don't actually believe that 'humans stopped evolving' was ever a widespread belief among scientists. This article has gotta be lying to me.by lomlobon
- Does anybody think that evolution just stops? A species only stops evolving when it is wiped out.by chaz6
- Who said we stopped evolving? Evolution is slow cause we are many. Another garbage clickbait press release that butchers the science.by jona-f
- As far as I was taught in college, evolution never stops, but we're just too short lived to notice that. We _may_ notice some very tiny blip on timescales of several hundred years, but last really noticeable traits happened many thousands years ago.
However, cultural/society/educational evolution happens much-much faster (but is also much-much weaker, can disappear on just a few weeks).
by deepsun - "Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection."
There has never been the slightest shred of evidence to that effect, anywhere, ever.
by gweinberg - Lactose tolerance is a classic example of a recently evolved trait.by chr15m