Nature Is Still Molding Human Genes, Study Finds 70
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years. A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution -- our technology, agriculture and the rest -- must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now. A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years.
The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study. He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids. The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines.
The steady rise of the mutation came about through natural selection, the scientists argue. For some reason, people with the mutation had more descendants than people without it -- even though it put them at risk of an autoimmune disorder. Other findings are even more puzzling. The researchers found that genetic variants that raise the odds of a smoking habit have been getting steadily rarer in Europe for the past 10,000 years. Something is working against those variants -- but it can't be the harm from smoking. Europeans have been smoking tobacco for only about 460 years. The scientists can't see from their research so far what forces might be making these variants more or less common. "My short answer is, I don't know," said Ali Akbari, a senior staff scientist at Harvard and an author of the study. The researchers also found that some variants, like the one linked to Type B blood, became much more common in Europe around 6,000 years ago, while others changed direction over time. For example, a TYK2 immune gene variant that may have once been beneficial later became harmful because it increased tuberculosis risk.
The study also found signs of natural selection in 44 out of 563 traits. Variants linked to Type 2 diabetes, wider waists, and higher body fat have become less common, possibly because farming and carbohydrate-heavy diets made once-useful fat-storing traits more harmful. Other findings, such as selection favoring genes linked to more years of schooling, are harder to interpret.
The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study. He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids. The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines.
The steady rise of the mutation came about through natural selection, the scientists argue. For some reason, people with the mutation had more descendants than people without it -- even though it put them at risk of an autoimmune disorder. Other findings are even more puzzling. The researchers found that genetic variants that raise the odds of a smoking habit have been getting steadily rarer in Europe for the past 10,000 years. Something is working against those variants -- but it can't be the harm from smoking. Europeans have been smoking tobacco for only about 460 years. The scientists can't see from their research so far what forces might be making these variants more or less common. "My short answer is, I don't know," said Ali Akbari, a senior staff scientist at Harvard and an author of the study. The researchers also found that some variants, like the one linked to Type B blood, became much more common in Europe around 6,000 years ago, while others changed direction over time. For example, a TYK2 immune gene variant that may have once been beneficial later became harmful because it increased tuberculosis risk.
The study also found signs of natural selection in 44 out of 563 traits. Variants linked to Type 2 diabetes, wider waists, and higher body fat have become less common, possibly because farming and carbohydrate-heavy diets made once-useful fat-storing traits more harmful. Other findings, such as selection favoring genes linked to more years of schooling, are harder to interpret.
Anyone who reads (Score:5, Insightful)
1. There is still a LOT we don’t know about the genome and the mechanisms that affect genetics.
2. This we know for sure. Whenever the environment of a species changes, the genome evolves rapidly as well
3. Humans are a subspecies of great ape
4. Human environment has changed at a stupendously fast rate over the past thousand years.
We are evolving. Fast. It’s so cute to listen to people who think we’ve somehow separated ourselves from our animal nature or the effects of evolution.
Re: (Score:2)
I hypothesize that the smoking linked gene might simply be "pushed out" due to the frequency of damage caused by smoking, so the gene might be expressed due to the exposure of tobacco/cannabis during youth, and in turn making them smell garbage/feces when exposed to it. Any time I run into people who still smoke, they smell absolutely disgusting it's smell that reminds me of campfire when you burn green/wet stuff. Cannabis smokers are worse, they smell like they rolled around in garbage juice or dog poop.
Th
Re:Anyone who reads (Score:5, Informative)
It's literally spelled out in the summary that the "smoking tendency gene" wouldn't be on the way out due to impact of smoking specifically because it's been becoming less common in Europe since well before tobacco, let alone weed, became available in the area. It wouldn't make sense anyway, because most of the negative effects of smoking don't manifest until a point in life well after the most children would have been had, especially until life expectancy exploded barely hundred years ago.
It could be any number of things, including people who have the gene being more likely to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in their caves, huts and houses. CO has been killing people of all ages well before first cigarette has ever been rolled.
Old smoking theories, are dying off. (Score:2)
It wouldn't make sense anyway, because most of the negative effects of smoking don't manifest until a point in life well after the most children would have been had, especially until life expectancy exploded barely hundred years ago.
Todays youth aren’t smoking. They’re doing the “healthier” alternative with vaping. Which is proving to be physically worse.
In many decades of growing up listening and learning about the harms of smoking, EVERY story of physical harm involved people at “that” point in life. Older people. It’s one of the main reasons younger people smoked. They honestly and provably thought they were immune to the harm.
When was the last time you heard of a teenager being hospita
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not even sure what's your point, other than trying to be very vocal about how little you think of vapers.
My comment was about how the research was talking about "smoker gene" that was already becoming less common before people started smoking (according to the study). And I added that, whatever pressure from the harm of smoking would be low anyway, because most of the problems from smoking manifest in populations much older than most of the ones surveyed by the research were.
Not that it matters, but I'v
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not even sure what's your point, other than trying to be very vocal about how little you think of vapers.
My comment was about how the research was talking about "smoker gene" that was already becoming less common before people started smoking (according to the study). And I added that, whatever pressure from the harm of smoking would be low anyway, because most of the problems from smoking manifest in populations much older than most of the ones surveyed by the research were.
And my comment was merely observing how that much-older harm theory will be dying off with that older generation because of the harm of next-generation nicotine delivery systems. (Legal) case in point? The shit Juul pulled was a textbook example of predatory marketing that ultimately ran into the morality of it all. If anything, the prevalence of younger (as in teenagers) being hospitalized due to the harm brought on in a very short time with vaping, paints a clearer picture of the absolute destructive c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Vaping is better than smoking because cigarette smoke has acetaldehyde, which literally turns one of your genes into a cancerous gene in the lungs. That's why cigarettes are more likely to give you cancer than marijuana.
I think you tried to compare an apple, an orange, and a banana there.
We've heard and been victimized plenty by the denials of Big Tobacco likely affecting most of the audience here in some way, since most of us are old enough to remember a related generation who was still being lied to about smoking, with everything from television commercials to MRE ration inserts to the damn family doctor shilling the fucking things to Mom as a stress reliever. There is no doubt that actual smoking (via cigarettes) cause
Re: (Score:2)
Citation?
Other than the EVALI thing from back alley THC vapes, I've never heard of a single person being harmed by vaping.
480,000 people in the US die from cigarettes every year. As far as I know, it's zero for vaping.
Re: (Score:2)
Skimmed a couple of those.
Lots of "can contain", "may harm".
The fact is, nobody specifically knows that vaping is bad for you. Will that still be the case in a few decades? Nobody knows.
Anybody who smokes tobacco should switch to vaping immediately.
Both of my parents died from cigarettes. Smoking will 100% kill you, and it's an awful way to die.
Re: (Score:2)
You're in denial. The most basic of searches reveals the following:
Vaping-related deaths are primarily linked to E-cigarette or Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury (EVALI), with the CDC confirming 68 deaths and over 2,800 hospitalizations during the 2019–2020 outbreak.
Did you simply assume Juul voluntarily donated two billion in settlement funds, because it's harmless?
Anybody who smokes tobacco should switch to vaping immediately.
Let me clarify how ignorant you really are. Anyone looking to kick the habit of nicotine addiction for good, should consult with a medical doctor and get a dermal patch. Not go to the fucking gas station and consult with the asshat selling imported unregulated vape dogshit while assuming "vaping" is vastly safer and won't harm you.
No. I'm
Re: (Score:2)
If your point is that cigarettes are better than vaping, no you are wrong. Smoking is much worse. The mechanism is well understood.
Switching to vape from cigarettes will give you immediate health improvements. If a dermal patch works for you, then do that. If vape works for you, then do that. But stop the cigarettes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds plausible to me. We also seem to have well above average resistance to alcohol and hella large liver relative to our mass. Partying does really seem to harden you. Or at least the offspring of ones of the ones who survived it.
Re: (Score:2)
There's possibly the "bad grandmother" theory, which tends to come up when conditions like Alzheimers are discussed.
In brief, there are secondary selection pressures in play, and these can influence natural selection as well. If you are healthy in later life, you can help support your children raise your grandchildren, which frees them up to have more children themselves, passing on your genes. If you are unhealthy, you both cannot help as much, but also your children may end up spending more of their resou
Re: (Score:1)
Your brain is just fucked up if you think it smells like garbage or feces. Have you ever smelled a skunk's spray? Does it smell like shit to you too?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nature really doesn't care much more than that, but the sentient mind does, and in the grand scheme of things, the sentient mind preempts genetics. I.e. The sentient mind gets more decision time, can make decisions faster, and can actively prevent genetics from being passed on. With increasing accuracy against specific tr
"Animal nature" (Score:2)
From what I've seen, most arguments against the assumption that evolution is still a thing in the human species tend to come from the anti-societal and anti-social fallacy assuming human societies and social systems protecting somehow disadvantaged individuals which would die early "in the wild" had stopped "natural selection".
I agree with much of
Re: (Score:2)
What? Taxonomy is science, not religion. Religion has nothing to do with this. Homo sapiens is a species in just the same way as cat and dog are species.
Re: (Score:2)
All you have to do is look at population response to infectious diseases to see the change.
The plague, smallpox, etc. all provided a mechanism to select for people who has some resistance and kill of those who didn't.
Also, mutations to genes are happening all the time. Most have no consequence but a few provide some advantage or disadvantage to the organism and are selectively enhanced or discouraged.
Even on short time scales (Score:3)
Humans today are growing more medial arteries in their forearms than less than a century ago. I suspect this may be due to the prevalence of typing and mousing requiring more blood flow. Evolution isn't just random DNA mutations; it's epigenetics directing what gets expressed how strongly, which exposes it to more genetic drift.
Re:Even on short time scales (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Unless typing and mousing affect your reproductive success
Based on my experiences as a teenager, I would say that "typing and mousing" did indeed affect my reproductive success... but not in a positive manner.
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's more "environmentally induced epigenetic modifications", which *are* a real thing, and sometimes can be inherited...but I don't think inheritance is needed for this argument, as the environment has kept chaning in the same direction. I.e. more fine muscle movement in the upper body, less massive physical effort.
Might make sense (Score:2)
I can easily see that a gene that makes the immune system more sensitive could not only attack gluten, but could also attack diseases.
It is not that hard to see a stronger immune system would keep people alive long enough to breed, even if they could not eat bread.
Re: Might make sense (Score:2)
Yes. The thing that kills people is diseases. Even in the modern era with colonialism and industrialized genocide, those are a drop in the ocean compared to diseases. Our ancestors didn't survive because they were smart and strong, they survived because they got less sick. That getting less sick allowed them to be smarter and stronger than people who got more sick, was just a bonus.
War and Genocide (Score:3)
You should probably thank War and Genocide more than Disease for maintaining the genetic evolution of Humanity at a rapid pace.
Diseases can work fast, certainly, but in general there's a sweet spot where killing the hosts too quickly prevents the disease from surviving in the population, and killing it too slowly allows the susceptible hosts to transmit their existing, unmutated, genes to the next generation. In the first case, the unfit humans cannot be exterminated as a whole, causing notable evolutiona
Re: (Score:2)
Just in case we were wondering what Deliberate Genocide looks like by the numbers, fifty million human lives are prematurely ended every year on this planet via abortion.
That's all of the deaths in the last World War, every two years.
Five World Wars worth of death, every decade.
I'm not so sure we should be "thankful" for that reality, regardless of the population increase that certainly wouldn't have been linear, because actually having children tends to force young adults to grow the fuck up real quick-
Re: (Score:2)
TL;DR: Having kids doesn't make anyone grow up. It just makes kids suddenly have to raise even younger kids into more uncertain outcomes.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. The thing that kills people is diseases.
that's today. 10000 years ago the main cause of death was trauma, then infectious diseases after agriculture and sedentarism were introduced along with overcrowding and less healthy lifestyles and diet. the main causes of death today are degenerative diseases from the combination of longer lifespans (because of sanitation and healthcare) and even crappier lifestyles and diet. genetics seems to have had a minor impact in all this.
Re: (Score:2)
Over evolutionary time, starvation was a major killer. It may be rare today (comparatively), but it used to be a real threat. Even today it's not insignificant. And it directly selects for the ability to eat whatever's available.
Re: (Score:2)
Our ancestors didn't survive because they were smart and strong, they survived because they got less sick. That getting less sick allowed them to be smarter and stronger than people who got more sick, was just a bonus.
It's difficult accepting your theories on disease when we realize that people today are capable of causing their own death due to the "stress" of a daylight savings time change.
If we're evolving, it's not in a good way. People get the slightest sniffle and it's rushing to the doctor to overprescribe on antibiotics becoming increasingly useless in medicine, because of that very mentality. I see humans today as generally far weaker than they were before. Gen Betas testosterone levels will match their ances
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, a double-edged sword, reminds me of that study a few years back tracing the trends of some certain gene back to the black plague. The variant afforded some resistance and slightly increased survival rates to the plague, but modern inheritors also have a slightly increased rate of autoimmune complications. Evolution filters for it as "more fit" when conditions change, but normally wouldn't have.
Still, the filter is usually most obsessed with calories, like niece post says. It's odd to see bread traded
Still working the only way it can! (Score:3)
I always found the notion that we could somehow stop evolving really weird. Real "end of history" vibes. Why would it ever exclude humans? Yeah, with really long lifespans and stretching median time to first offspring, you make the generational loop a little longer, but guess what? Turns out the later in life you have kids, the more mutations get introduced. We're also so populous and due to dominance of monogamy, relatively spread out in who gets to breed (unlike some species where competition is more exclusive and only few select males or females get to procreate with lot of dead end individuals).
Lot of people look at genetics and take from it that you're half clone of either of your parents but I always got more of an impression that you have two extremely sparsely functional codebases that get jammed together by a very non-deterministic, heuristic driven set of compilers until something capable of describing a person hopefully emerges. A species maintaining a not just a survival capable but also unchanging genetic code seems if nothing else, just super duper unlikely to ever happen. And it's not like our environment has been staying the same either.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would evolution no longer apply to us ? OK: our technology, medicine, etc might mean that some pressures might be reduced but they are still there and others will appear. Eg: we do not need to be as strong, so weaker people are not so selected against, so more weaker people survive; our modern diets are causing health problems, so there will be pressure to better cope with them; ...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Evolution always applies because of random mutations, and the fact that all 8billion of us have not yet mated with the remaining 4billion or so. We have no idea what comes of that.
Add in causal mutations, meaning the introductions of new pressures on DNA. Microplastics in life comes to mind. Add increased radiation by harming or altering the atmosphere that serves as our shield from certain death.
Selective bacteria, viruses, microRNA, enter the picture.
We might evolve, but we always mutate; except for clone
Idiocracy : bad genes will prevail (Score:1)
Scary what the future will look like.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't play with things you don't understand.
Take sickle cell anaemia for example. It is an extremely unpleasant - and life shortening - condition, but the underlying gene mutation protects against Malaria. If someone inherits the gene from one parent, they have the Malaria protection. If they inherit from both parents, bad news. All this has been known for some time now, and nowadays the gene is probably more trouble than it's worth, except in areas where Malaria is endemic.
Re: (Score:2)
damn, I forgot the other ones.
There is a mutation which increases the likelihood of surviving Bubonic Plague. Not a big deal nowadays but up until 330 years ago it made a really big difference.
When Covid first started and the Chinese were not being so defensive about it, their data indicated that people with certain blood groups were far more likely to die than people with other blood types. As it happens, my blood group was "low risk" and - even though I was frequently exposed to people who had it - it t
Re: (Score:3)
You're very welcome to guide your personal procreation choices according to your evolutionary conscience. Anything else is by principle a staple of reactionary movements that lack the scientific rigor to ever hope to figure out what the "healthy" direction would be. Dogs have been meticulously "guided" for centuries and they sure aren't healthier for it than we are and generally don't live longer than wolves (in captivity). Losing dogs you like *fucking sucks* and we've been trying pretty hard to figure out
Re: (Score:1)
Losing dogs you like *fucking sucks* and we've been trying pretty hard to figure out what makes a healthy breed, but it's really, really hard!
In fact most of the effort recently has been put into creating unhealthy breeds with fucked up faces that can't breathe properly and/or can't give birth without surgery... we definitely cannot be trusted with Eugenics.
Re: Eugenics (Score:2)
Wonder if I was modded down by a Nazi, an animal abuser, or both
High altitude adaptation (Score:2)
Humans have evolved at least 3 different adaptations to living at high altitude, one in only the last 3000 years.
Anthropomorphize (Score:4, Interesting)
"Human Genes Are Changing" that's all you need to say.
Re: (Score:3)
Death and Selection (Score:1)
Huh. The biggest mortality factor currently is perinatal death -- kids that don't make it out of the womb. Any genetic factor which works against that will see strong selection pressure.
And remember that as far as reproduction goes, once you're 45 or so you are used up. Genes which affect health after that date have no or very little effect on natural selection.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm surprised (and corrected) (Score:3)
So basically what Darwin said in 1859? (Score:2)
I read "On the Origin of the Species" a while back, but I recall a core message was that while natural selection tends to produce regimentation, as in everyone looks nearly the same as stays that way for ages, unnatural selection as in domestication of plants and animals produces the huge variety we have in dogs etc quickly. Darwin was a racing pigeon breeder, so he goes on about
Tribes vs Civilisation (Score:3)
I know this is naive, but I wonder just how far from the mark it is, why, and what the scientific evidence actually shows about this.