PLOS Genetics has a nice review titled The Jewels of Our Genome: The Search for the Genomic Changes Underlying the Evolutionarily Unique Capacities of the Human Brain. It is short and pithy and hits the major points (e.g., SNPs vs. duplications vs. gene expression), so I see no reason to offer any commentary or review of an an already satisfactory commentary and review. If you want original research articles in this area, go here. Some of the material is even open access now.
Update: John Hawks has more.
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Earlier studies have indicated that a gene called FOXP2, possibly involved in brain development, is extremely conserved in vertebrates, except for two notable mutations in humans. This finding suggested that this gene may in some way be involved in the evolution of language, and was thus dubbed by…
Update II: Follow up post. You really should read Greg and John Hawks, seeing as how they have a paper in the pipeline on this topic which is stepping off from where Lahn et. al. left off.
Update: Greg and John Hawks have much more must read stuff!
Read about it here. Here is the paper, Evidence…
This google news query should get you to popular press articles. I'll start putting links to blogs when more come in.
Blogs: One of the lead authors, John Hawks, promises lots of commentary this week. Greg Laden has some questions regarding the demographic assumptions. Steve Sailer with a round-…
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own…