"Adventures in Very Recent Evolution"
07/21/2010
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Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that I've been debunking dumb ideas for many years now, yet dumb ideas remains wildly popular.

But think how Nicholas Wade, the genetics correspondent of the New York Times, must feel. He has the top soapbox in the world for educating the public, the New York Times, and he covers for the NYT the trendiest topic in science, genetics. He has spent the last decade (here are VDARE articles I wrote praising Wade's NYT work in 2003 and 2006) diligently debunking the reigning dumb ideas of our age, such as "Race doesn't exist," "Race is just skin deep," and "Racial differences couldn't have evolved because there hasn't been enough time." For nine or ten years, he has used dozens of New York Times articles to aim a firehose of the latest scientific findings at these dogmas ... and, as far as I can tell, nobody ever notices.

They don't Watson him. I've never noticed anybody objecting to Wade. They just don't ever get what he's saying. It doesn't register. The conventional wisdom is so comforting and so status-raising that relentless reporting in the New York Times can't dent it, or even make most NYT readers notice that their favorite beliefs are being subverted. Wade has been engaging in Popperian falsification of the age's dominant theories, and nobody notices.

Perhaps the average NYT subscriber reads each Wade article on the latest findings of genetic differences among racial groups, nods complacently, and then says to himself, "Yes, those Red State racist Republicans are just too stupid to realize that Darwin proves that race does not exist, whereas I live in New York and subscribe to the Times which keeps me up to date on ... on ... well, on whatever this article was about, but whatever it was about, I know, because I subscribe to the Times, that it proves that science shows that race is only skin deep, because there wasn't enough time for differences to evolve like those stupid Jesus fish people believe who don't believe in evolution, sometimes they just make me so angry because they come from a long line of hereditary idiots," and then he moves on to closely peruse an article about how to get his kid into a Park Slope school district with really good schools.

From the NYT:

Adventures in Very Recent Evolution by Nicholas Wade

Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery – the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.

I imagine American Indians left too early to didn't get this gene?

Here's a question I've wondered about. There are two scandalous scenes of drunkenness in the Book of Genesis, Noah and Lot, but how many are there in the rest off the Bible? The Wedding at Cana, for example, is non-scandalous.

The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.

... Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress....

So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.

One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.

About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes – 23 percent of the human total – were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection – probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.

Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is ”sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.

From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.

A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.

She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold.

Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. ”One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.

... Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them. ...

That's interesting because you can walk from, say, Normandy to Korea. The physical anthropologists of Carleton Coon's mid-century generation believed from looking at bones that the biggest division in mankind was caused by the Himalayas and other mountains dividing West Afro-Eurasia from East Asia, although subsequent genetics studies suggested the biggest division was between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. But, the old bone guys must have been a little bit right about this Europe-Asia divide.

Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations.

By the way, this is the source of the widely held dogma/ urban legend for the quasi-educated that black Africans are the most genetically diverse people on Earth, or, in increasingly crazier variants, that two white Americans might less related to each other than to a black African, or that you and your brother are less similar to each other genetically than you are to an African. This is true for neutral ("junk") genes that aren't selected not for functional genes. (I debunked this ten years ago in Seven Dumb Ideas about Race.)

Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.

One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. ”It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute. ...

But the new evidence that humans have adapted rapidly and extensively suggests that natural selection must have other options for changing a trait besides waiting for the right mutation to show up. In an article in Current Biology in February, Dr. Pritchard suggested that a lot of natural selection may take place through what he called soft sweeps.

Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.

Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.

A lot of human biodiversity at the phenome level is relative rather than absolute, quantitative rather than qualitative.

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