Brown gaucho & Tangled Bank #63

Our old friend Brown Gaucho is hosting Tangled Bank #63. I enjoyed his post, The importance of evolution in medicine. BG is a primatologist-turned-med student, so he knows of what he speaks. But, I do have to take some issue with this contention:

Anatomically and genetically, humans haven't changed all that much in the past 100,000 years.

Yes, anatomically modern humans emerged over 100,000 years ago, but, that does not suffice to allow us to assume that genetically humans haven't changed "all that much." Of course, that depends on how you define "all that much," but a supercharged immune system forged in the fires of the Eurasian pathogen pool & lactose tolerance don't show up in the fossil record....

Tags

More like this

Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he's very impressed with genetic engineering (he's a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people…
James May, one of the presenters on Top Gear, is trying his hand at providing a little science education. I want to say…please stop. Here he is trying to answer the question, "Are humans still evolving?" In the end he says the right answer — yes they are! — but the path he takes to get there is…
John Wilkins has a post on race where he expresses skepticism about its biological reality. He comment was in response to a post on my other blog (by another individual), but I'll stand by it. I've talked abut race in the past, and I'm not into the topic at this point since it is going over old…
One of the great things about science is that old orthodoxies regularly get overturned; it's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course the personal downside is that it means models which scholars have invested their lives and intellectual capital into may turn out to be unsupportable, but at the end of…