Re: Rapid acceleration in human evolution described

I've not read much about that yet, even thoug John Hawks has some
posts about the whole thing in his weblog. Anyway, as far as I've been
reading, if I'm not mistaken, there's apparently constant assumption
or even conclusion that it's due to natural selection, rather than the
result of reduction of natural selection.

Why is that? Intuitivelly seems to me that the expected result of
agriculture and the rise of technology and civilization would be an
gradual accelerating decrease of natural selection. I've read that the
acceleration peaks on the last 10 thousand years, which I think that
would also be according with that.

Furthermore, neutral selection is immensurably faster (well, perhaps
mensurably, but a lot faster) than the selection of genes. Natural
selection, by its very nature, is something that constrains the
"total" of potential evolution, allowing only the fit to survive and
reproduce. Reduce NS and evolution will accelerate.

Things like agriculture, civilization and industry, allow populations
to increase beyond the possibilities of a more "natural" lifestyle,
which by itself will also increase the speed of evolution by a sort of
inherent increase in mutations in the whole population, despite of the
same mutation rate. But not only that, more mutations wouldn't be
eliminated by natural selection. Some could be favored, by strikes me
as very odd that these could be a meaningful fraction of the whole.

Summarizing all this mess... I think that there may be some
difficulties and confusion when trying to distinguish adaptive
evolution from neutral in this unusual scenario... is anyone more
informed on the datails to put some light on this possible issue?

And, besides all that. It was commonly said that populations differ
more within themselves than between themselves, that supposedly was
nothing just made up, but had a genetical, at least theoretical, but I
believe that empirical, basis. But how's that now? I've read a quote
that was something like that we're more different from each other
today than people from 5 thousand years ago differed from neanderthals
(which separated from our lineage 500 thousand years or maybe somewhat
more (depending on that 10myo gorilla being meaningful to the
molecular clocks).


Danniel Soares

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