p-ter has an excellent review of a new paper, Localizing Recent Adaptive Evolution in the Human Genome. Imagine if you will a flat pristine stretch of snow covered field which exhibits a perfect 2-dimensional symmetry. Now, note what happens when a few snow blowers criss-cross the field. That's the sort of thing I imagine when attempting to analogize selective sweeps going through human populations over the past few tens of thousands of years. Money shot:
...In general, we find that recent adaptation is strikingly pervasive in the human genome, with as much as 10% of the genome affected by linkage to a selective sweep.
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Update on paper access: You can get it here already.
Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution:
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John Hawks & Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to a new paper in Genome Research, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations. As Dan notes, it's Open Access, so you can read the PDF yourself. That being said, "Just read it!" might be somewhat a tall…
For those of you interested in recent adaptive evolution in some insignificant bipedal primate, John Hawks and pals have published a paper in PNAS describing something you'll find interesting. Of course, if you're interested in such things, you already know that. Here are some links related to…
In Natural selection of a human gene: FUT2 I referred to a paper, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations (see my earlier review). Now the same group has a follow up paper which takes a slightly different tack, The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation:…