Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The other day, BBC Radio 4 presented a half-hour show hosted by Adam Rutherford: “Human evolution versus cultural evolution,” the first of a two-part series called “In our own image: evolving humanity”. You can hear the show at the link, and I understand it will be up for a week. The show features evolutionary luminaries … Continue reading Are humans still evolving?: a Radio 4 show.
Whenever I give a talk on evolution for the public, I always get this question: “Are we still evolving?” People want to know if our species is changing. Are we getting smarter or better-looking? Or are we degenerating as medicine keeps alive many of us who would have been ruthlessly culled on the savanna? My … Continue reading Are humans still evolving?
If you want a succinct description of how scientists are finding human genes that have experienced natural selection over the past few thousand years, you could do worse than read Ann Gibbons’s three-page “news focus” in this week’s Science, “Tracing evolution’s recent fingerprints” (a bit of a mixed metaphor, that). The article is a useful … Continue reading “Real time” selection in humans
The perennial question I’m asked in public lectures is this: Are we still evolving? (“We,” of course, means “humans.”) A while back I highlighted a paper by Byars et al. that measured selection on various traits in a human population, showing that features like weight, blood pressure, and age of menopause were indeed under selection. … Continue reading Are we still evolving? Part 2
by Greg Mayer The answer is: Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish naturalist. But there’s a story behind this bare fact. One of the great problems facing natural history in the 18th century was the problem of diversity: the great variety of plants and animals from all over the world that began flooding into European museums … Continue reading Who is the type specimen of Homo sapiens?
