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We're Still Evolving--And We May Be Shrinking
from ScienceNOW Daily News
A subset of women in Framingham, Massachusetts, is evolving at the same rate as the average animal and plant, and will become shorter and heavier over successive generations. That means that natural selection continues to exert its influence over humans, researchers argue in a new study, one of the more ambitious to assess evolution's impact on modern humans.
Soon after Darwin published his theory of evolution, Lawson Tait, a surgeon, wrote that the law of natural selection does not apply to people because medicine keeps adverse traits in the gene pool. Some doctors still think this today, says Yale University evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns, but they're wrong. Natural selection continues to exert its pressure through our reproductive success: the more children we have, the more our traits spread through the population.
For evidence, Stearns and colleagues turned to the Framingham Heart Study, a classic source of family history data. Started in 1948, the study has followed the cardiovascular health of about 5000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, and their descendents over 3 generations. Stearns and colleagues followed only women from the study because they didn't initially have information on paternity.
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