Can't stop, evolving

Are human beings evolving right now?

It seems a strange thought in the context of our modern lives, which (thankfully!) seem so remote from the struggle for survival in the 'eat or be eaten' world of our primate-like ancestors.

But, as Oxford's Gil McVean recently told the BA Festival, see The Telegraph [scroll down!], the basic factors that drive evolution haven't gone away so there's no reason to think we're not evolving.

'People ask whether humans are still evolving, well in order to have evolution you need a dynamic, shifting environment and you need processes generating variation... What I'm showing is that these two things are still very much happening and as a consequence we are still very much evolving.' He commented.

Gil is a statistician at Oxford's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG) and, as we've blogged before, has been involved in studying human genetic variation for such projects as HapMap and the 1000 Genomes Project.

The reason we're not all sprouting extra fingers for texting or compound eyes to monitor multiple computer screens is that, at the level of an organism, evolution is slow and subtle. Yet for those studying the genetic make-up of humans there's plenty of evidence to show how our genes have changed and are still changing. 

As Gil has previously commented: 'The patterns in genetic variation are produced by evolution. If you can analyse those patterns, you can tease out the evolutionary history.'

Your comments

• interesting..

  Joe Shields | 16 Sep 08

  Interesting stuff!! But what about Selection? As "survive of the fittest"...

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