Human evolution "speeding up"
Quotes from the story:
"I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed," explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "The opposite seems to be true."
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this belief has an "opposite"?
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"That doesn't mean we should expect major changes in a few generations, though, evolution occurs over thousands of years."
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Very Convenient.
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"If evolution had been proceeding steadily at the current rate since humans and chimps separated 6 million years ago there should be 160 times more differences than the researchers found."
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How dynamic of you evolution! Even evolution evolves so that the data look like what you need them to look like!
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The increase in human population from millions to billions in the last 10,000 years accelerated the rate of evolution because "we were in new environments to which we needed to adapt," Harpending adds. "And with a larger population, more mutations occurred."
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I thought most of the population explosion was in the last few hundred years, but I could be mistaken.
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and from another similar story :
All of which poses a problem for anyone who equates genes with human nature, or who expects evolution to take God's place as judge and perfecter of humankind. It may be true that today's God [is] a human creation. But so, in a way, is today's evolution.
second story here
posted by InterestingPhysics @ 9:43 AM
2 Comments:
so therefore we came from dirt?
this is science correcting itself, theories change to fit the data, yay science!
welcome George! Yes, this is science correcting itself, and yes to yay for science. As a skeptic to the 'macro-evolution'(we'll say ME for short) scenario, I'm just pointing out this interesting turn of events in the ME science world. It seems to me that every few months MEists are redefining what ME is. Constantly changing the time for the first humans, (see previous posts on this subject) What prompts me to believe the notion that evolution has dramatically sped up, when I have previously been told that it had slowed down from ages past? It is these inconsistencies that fuel my skepticism. If ME circa 2007 looks very different from ME 2006 or 2000 or 1980 or 1930, then why not be at least somewhat skeptical?
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