Phil. Inquirer: Human genome moving fast
Maybe, as an old story has it, a Neanderthal transported through time, put into a nondescript set of clothes and plopped on a city bus, would hardly draw a glance (pulling a hat low on his big nosed face might help). But in Monday’s Inquirer science writer Faye Flam writes that even a fully H. sapiens-type from a few tens of thousands of years ago and somehow blessed with modern language would probably stand out in a jiffy were a psuchologist and physiologist to run a few tests on metabolism, immune system ability, behavior, and other features controlled from deep in its genome.
Human evolution, and not the kind that split our line from something apish but the sort that is underway inside us right now, is a hot topic these days. Flam’s long feature even brushes lightly along a topic that makes many people nervous – whether aspects of intelligence have evolved recently in different distributions among broad geographic and ancestral groupings (one hesitates to say “races” because that useful yet perplexing term, like the gradient-accomodating phrase immediately preceding, lacks precision in time or location or natural biological edges). There are suggestions, she writes before quickly moving along, that Ashkenazi jews, for instance, score a bit above average on IQ tests due to their mix of genes.
Mostly it’s about the revelation that we are evolving apace these days with implications in particular for health – that ancestry can be a cue to doctors on patterns of disease vulnerability, treatments likely to work better than others, and so on. And blue eyes only go back about 6000 years. It’s a good story with multiple sources and plenty of reasonable-sounding detail.
Worth noting is that a few months ago another small spike of stories circulated on the same topic. That followed a presentation in Austin at the Council for the Advancement of Science’s annual New Horizons of Science conference – in turn twinned at ScienceWriters2009 and the NASW workshops. (Disclosure and Plug – I’m on CASW’s board and urge all members of the sci-journalism clan to consider this year’s November 5-9 meeting at Yale in New Haven. Coverage of this topic from the Austin meeting included:
- MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: How We’re Evolving ;
And if you have the time for a really long feature:”
- Discover Magazine (Mar 2009) Kathleen McAuliffe: They Don’t Make Homo Sapiens LIke They Used To ;
Pic source ;
- Charlie Petit
