The rapid ascent of man: how the human races are evolving apart

DAVID DERBYSHIRE
UK Daily Mail
Tuesday December 11, 2007

Humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any time in history, according to a study.

Scientists say the speed of natural selection has accelerated so much that within a few generations we will have evolved resistance to diseases such as diabetes and malaria.

Instead of people from different parts of the world becoming more alike over time, they have actually been diverging, the study suggests.

Dr Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah who led the study, looked for clues about the speed of evolution in the DNA of 270 people from around the world.

The research showed that the population explosion since the Ice Age 10,000 years ago had accelerated the rate of genetic change.

"We aren't the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago," he told the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.

"Human races are evolving away from each other. Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin.

"We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity."

The study looked for genetic evidence of natural selection - the evolution of favourable gene mutations - during the past 80,000 years by analysing DNA from northern Europe, China, Japan and Africa's Yoruba tribe.

The Europeans were mostly represented by data from Utah Mormons. It looked at genetic variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms.

Full article here.