ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2007
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 468 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Power of neutrality tests for detecting natural selection.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
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- The 4 D's of Pellagra and Progress.International journal of tryptophan research : IJTR · 2020Review
- Assortative mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans.Bio Systems · 2020Article
- Can postfertile life stages evolve as an anticancer mechanism?PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Alleles associated with physical activity levels are estimated to be older than anatomically modern humans.PloS one · 2019Article
- Current evolutionary adaptiveness of anxiety: Extreme phenotypes of anxiety predict increased fertility across multiple generations.Journal of psychiatric research · 2018Article
- An integrated model of gene-culture coevolution of language mediated by phenotypic plasticity.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Gene-culture coevolution in whales and dolphins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate high enough to explain the number of recently selected variants would predict (i) site heterozygosity at least 10-fold lower than is observed in humans, (ii) a strong relationship of heterozygosity and local recombination rate, which is not observed in humans, (iii) an implausibly high number of adaptive substitutions between humans and chimpanzees, and (iv) nearly 100 times the observed number of high-frequency linkage disequilibrium blocks. Larger populations generate more new selected mutations, and we show the consistency of the observed data with the historical pattern of human population growth. We consider human demographic growth to be linked with past changes in human cultures and ecologies. Both processes have contributed to the extraordinarily rapid recent genetic evolution of our species.
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