Evolution of the alphabet | Linkade. 10.1007/s12052-009-0128-1. Genome study places modern humans in the evolutionary fast lane. Dec. 10, 2007 Countering a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a new study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts. Anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection in the past 5,000 years has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. His research is based on analysis of international genetic data that provides evidence of recent positive selection. The finding is likely to spark a rethinking of common assumptions about evolution being relaxed in modern humans. Photo: Michael Forster Rothbart "In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations," says Hawks.
The recent changes are especially striking, he says. Humans Evolving More Rapidly Than Ever, Say Scientists | Wired S. Look out, future, because here we come: scientists say the speed of human evolution increased rapidly during the last 40,000 years — and it’s only going to get faster. The findings, published today by a team of U.S. anthropologists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, overturn the theory that modern life’s relative ease has slowed or even stopped human adaptation. Selective pressures are still at work; they just happen to be different than those faced by our distant ancestors. "We’re more different from people 5,000 years ago than they were from Neanderthals," said study co-author and University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending.
In the study, researchers analzyed genomes from 270 people belonging to four disparate ethnic groups: Han Chinese, Africa’s Yoruba tribe, Japanese and Utah Mormons. By comparing areas of difference and similarity, they determined that about seven percent of the genome has undergone significant change since the end of the last Ice Age. Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human N. Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature. This means two things.
First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences. Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, RichardDawkins.net - The Official Richard Dawkins Website. RE-INTRODUCING GROUP SELECTION TO THE HUMAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES.
The Nature and Units of Social Selection. Share: MyIDEAS: Login Powered by Translate Abstract On the basis of the technical definition of selection developed by George Price (1995), we describe two forms of selection that commonly occur at the social level, subset selection and generative selection. Both forms of selection are abstract and general, and therefore also incomplete; both leave aside the question of explaining the selection criterion and why entities possess stable traits. However, an important difference between the two kinds of selection is that generative selection can accommodate an explanation of how new variation is created, while subset selection cannot. An evolutionary process involving repeated cycles of generative selection can, in principle, continue indefinitely because imperfect replication generates new variation along the way, whereas subset selection reduces variation and eventually grinds to a halt.
Download Info To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. Bibliographic Info Lists. Shark's virgin birth stuns scientists | Earth News | Earth. For Human Eyes Only. UK | Human species may split in. Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology. People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. Race 'ironed out' But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims. However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology. Differential Evolution Homepage. For Continuous Function Optimization (an algorithm by Kenneth Price and Rainer Storn) Table of contents History Differential Evolution grew out of Ken Price's attempts to solve the Chebychev Polynomial fitting Problem that had been posed to him by Rainer Storn.
A breakthrough happened, when Ken came up with the idea of using vector differences for perturbing the vector population. Basics DE is a very simple population based, stochastic function minimizer which is very powerful at the same time. Basically, DE adds the weighted difference between two population vectors to a third vector. Practical Advice If you are going to optimize your own objective function with DE, you may try the following classical settings for the input file first: Choose method e.g. Keep in mind that different problems often require different settings for NP, F and CR (have a look into the different papers to get a feeling for the settings). Java Code C Code There are two ways to work with DeWin: MATLAB ® Code Scilab Code. The Face of Tomorrow: the Human Face of Gl. Shared ancestor to humans, present-day non.
Public release date: 23-Jul-2006 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Jennifer Wengerjwenger@mail.nih.gov 301-496-7243NIH/National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders When contemplating the coos and screams of a fellow member of its species, the rhesus monkey, or macaque, makes use of brain regions that correspond to the two principal language centers in the human brain, according to research conducted by scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), two of the National Institutes of Health.
The finding, published July 23 in the advance online issue of Nature Neuroscience, bolsters the hypothesis that a shared ancestor to humans and present-day non-human primates may have possessed the key neural mechanisms upon which language was built. . [ Print | E-mail AAAS and EurekAlert! TaoTeChing.org. Research Intelli. Relative to their body size, monkeys, apes and humans have unusually big brains. It has been suggested that this reflects the complexity of their social lives. This hypothesis is gaining support thanks to ground-breaking research by a University of Liverpool scientist, whose methods have been taken up by primate researchers around the world. These same methods could soon shed light on the story of human evolution.
Judged by our genomes, there's surprisingly little difference between humans and chimps: 95% of our DNA is similar, making chimps our closest ape 'cousins'. Clearly, brain size plays a crucial role: all primates have big brains relative to their body size, but human brains are disproportionately large. Why did these changes take place in primates in general, and humans so particularly?
Over the past decade, a Liverpool University scientist has subjected this ‘social brain’ hypothesis to rigorous tests. Innovative Models Significant correlations The human dimension back to top. The Loom : Humans As Cat Chow. Two hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts, an African lion killed someone. Along with a meal, the big cat got a wicked stomachache. Today a record of that unfortunate death still survives, in the bacteria that make big cats sick. The trail of this strange story starts in the 1980s, when scientists discovered that ulcers are caused by bacteria known as known as Helicobacter pylori.
H. pylori is found in people around the world, and scientists learned how to recognize the different strains they carried. Based on the patterns of the strains, a team of scientists concluded in 2003 that Helicobacter pylori must have been present early in the history of our species, and was spread across the world during the migration of humans. (I wrote a long post on H. pylori and human evolution when the scientists who discovered its link to ulcers got the Nobel Prize.) But there were skeptics. The Loom : Darwin, Meet Frankenstein. Scientists have figured out many ways to study the origin of species. They can build evoluitonary trees, to see how species descend from a common ancestor.
They can survey islands or mountains or lakes to see how ecological conditions foster the rise of new species. They can look for fossils that offer clues to how long ago species branched off from one another, and how their ranges spread or shrank. Now comes a new trick in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature: to test their ideas about how a new species of butterfly came to be, they essentially recreated it in their lab. The new species in question was a graceful little butterfly called Heliconius heurippa. Scientists were also struck by the similarity between H. heurippa and another species, H. cydno. H. heurippa almost looks like a simple combination of the other two species.
This was a provocative idea. To try to rule out these sorts of alternative explanations, the scientists looked at H. heurippa from many angles. Stranger Fruit: Go USA! Were #2 .... kind. SFL ORG. News Center Taking evolution&s te. Taking evolution’s temperature: Researchers pinpoint the energy it takes to make a species GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Comfortable living is not why so many different life forms seem to converge at the warmer areas of the planet. Writing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say higher temperatures near the equator speed up the metabolisms of the inhabitants, fueling genetic changes that actually lead to the creation of new species.
The finding — by researchers from the University of Florida, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Harvard University and the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque — helps explain why more living species seem to exist near the equator, a scientific observation made even before naturalist Charles Darwin set sail to South America on the H.M.S. Beagle nearly two centuries ago. It may also have a bearing on concepts such as global warming and efforts to preserve diversity of life on Earth. Richard Dawkins: Science, Delusion and the. Richard Dawkins Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder [1.3.97] In his role as the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Dawkins regularly talks to the public regarding his views on the wonders of science.
Several weeks ago, on November 12th, 1996, he delivered the following Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC1 Television in England. You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. Aristotle had a lot to say about astronomy, biology and physics. Continue... Newton Navigator Example. Islands spark accelerated evolution. Public release date: 11-Sep-2006 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Natalie Bouaravongpress@plos.org 415-568-3445Public Library of Science The notion of islands as natural test beds of evolution is nearly as old as the theory itself. The restricted scale, isolation, and sharp boundaries of islands create unique selective pressures, often to dramatic effect. Following what's known as the "island rule," small animals evolve into outsize versions of their continental counterparts while large animals shrink.
Millien collected data from text, figures, and tables in an extensive survey of the published literature. The finding that mammals evolve faster on islands, Millien argues, comports with the island evolution theory prediction that mammals respond to their new island homes with rapid morphological and size adaptations. If island species can evolve quickly, Millien argues, it stands to reason that mainland species retain a similar capacity. . [ Print | E-mail. Ancestral Line. Evolutionary biologists use a cladogram, the treelike diagram of evolutionary branches or clades, to organize species into lines of evolutionary descent across time.
Biologists use three types of evidence to deduce evolutionary connections: genetics, morphology, and geologic dating. (Behavior, normally a key part of evolutionary studies, can only be inferred in extinct species — for example, by examining the ecology in which the species flourished and the species adaptations for eating and locomotion.) Analyses of primate fossils and the genetic relatedness of living primates converge to the conclusion that humans and chimpanzees branched from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago. DNA recovered from several uncontaminated Neanderthalensis fossils indicated that modern humans and extinct neanderthals diverged about 400,000 years ago; but more recent studies show that they must have interbred within Europe or the Middle East since then.
Evolutionary psychology: An emerging integ. 2002 Volume 2: 17-61 ( 15 January ) URL of this document {*style:<b> Original Article </b>*} By Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair , Psychologist, Nordfjord Psychiatric Centre, 6770 NORDFJORDEID, Norway. Abstract Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is an emerging integrative approach to the study of Human Nature, founded upon evolutionary biological theory and cognitive science. Evolutionary Psychology - Human Nature - Modular Mind - Human Sociobiology - Adaptationism - Scientist-Practitioner - Evolutionary Psychopathology {*style:<u> I.
</u>*} “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Charles Darwin, 1859/1996, p. 394. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973, p. 125. “Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?” George C. This article is founded upon two basic principles. II. III. Evolution: Change. Evolution -- Charles Darwin &A. R. Wallace. ETSS.net - Evolutionary Theories in the So. Disney meets Darwin. Evolution Timeline.
American Scientist Online - An interview.