Report Data from 0.5 million people show natural selection hasn't stopped; Prefers lower IQs, fatter men

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In an age when humans in industrialized countries have good access to birth control and are seldom eaten by predators, is natural selection still directing our evolution? Probably more than you might think, a new study suggests.

Natural selection is still influencing the evolution of a wide variety of human traits, from when people start having children to their body mass index, reports a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's surprising to some scientists. I think it's probably even more surprising to the general public," acknowledges lead author Jaleal Sanjak, who just completed his PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of California Irvine. "It's pretty neat."

Many traits vary among different members of a population of humans and animals, from body size to hair colour, and those differences are often linked to differences in genes. Natural selection occurs when some of those traits help some individuals survive and reproduce more than others. That causes their genes to become more common in the population over time, and it's the way species evolve to adapt to changes in their environment.

To see what traits were being selected for in humans, the researchers used DNA and medical data from more than 200,000 women over the age of 45 and 150,000 men over the age of 50 — that is, people who had mostly finished having babies — from a huge database of volunteers in the U.K. called the U.K. Biobank.




something_memory said:
TL;DR:
  • UK dataset
  • Takes into account only people with white british ancestry
Natural selection favours:
  • Shorter women
  • Fatter men
  • Lower education
  • Lower IQ
 
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