{"id":169,"date":"2007-12-12T08:48:13","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T13:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=169"},"modified":"2009-03-16T08:51:34","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T13:51:34","slug":"scratch-another-dearly-loved-sf-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2007\/12\/12\/scratch-another-dearly-loved-sf-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"Scratch another dearly loved sf myth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nNew research seems to show <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2007-12\/uow-gsp120507.php\">mordern human evolution is supercharged<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"cite\">\n<p>\nIn a study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone \u2014 around the period of the Stone Age \u2014 has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\u201cIn evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,\u201d says Hawks. \u201cAnd every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, Hawks says, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival. Adds Hawks: \u201cWe are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\nScience fiction&#8217;s dirty little secret is that it tends to believe in pseudoscience more often than it does in real science; even supposedly &#8220;hard&#8221; science fiction is littered with impossible or just wrong science. The idea that evolution has &#8220;stopped&#8221; is one of them, usually used in a setting which contrasts the brave manly colonists of Proycon B with the teeming soulles dependent masses ruled by an incompetent, corrupt bureaucracy of Earth. So much for that idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New research seems to show mordern human evolution is supercharged: In a study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone \u2014 around the period of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[54,2441],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-evolution","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}