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In a recent book entitled The 10,000 Year Explosion: How civilization accelerated human evolution, anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending of Utah University explain why they think humans are evolving, and at an accelerated rate. This theory is raising eyebrows as many evolutionary biologists think human kind has reached a plateau from an evolutionary point of view.

The scientists drew upon a database that contains patterns of human genetic variation and also on the Human Genome Project. Cochran and Harpending say that one of the factors that increased evolution’s pace was rapid cultural changes, brought forward by the invention of agriculture and urbanization.

This book is available at our online store via Amazon.co.uk for £15.99.

New Scientist Magazine reports on the book:

“They found strong evidence that advantageous alleles in these regions [i.e. Europe and Africa] are sweeping through the human population – evidence of natural selection at work. These sweeps began earlier in Africa than in Europe, perhaps 80,000 and 40,000 years ago, respectively.”

“The evidence the authors present builds an overwhelming case that natural selection has recently acted strongly on us and may be continuing unabated, though the authors’ estimate of a 100-fold increase in the rate of recent evolution seems too high.”

You can read a full review of the book on the New Scientist website here.

For more information about the book (continue reading…)

What better way to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday today than by posting an article by Richard Dawkins reviewing a book called “Why Evolution is True”, by Jerry Coyne?

Happy Birthday Mr. Darwin!

Enjoy!

From The Times Literary Supplement, 11 Feb 2009

Why we really do need to know the amazing truth about evolution, and the equally amazing intellectual dishonesty of its enemies

Review of Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins

This book is available in our online shop via Amazon.co.uk. On sale £14.99 £9.47.

How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world. Given the title of Jerry Coyne’s book, this is a distraction that I must deal with.

A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.

But now a certain kind of anthropologist can be relied on to jump up and say something like the following: Who are you to elevate scientific “truth” so? The tribal beliefs are true in the sense that they hang together in a meshwork of consistency with the rest of the tribe’s world view. Scientific “truth” is only one kind (“Western” truth, the anthropologist may call it, or even “patriarchal”). Like tribal truths, yours merely hang together with the world view that you happen to hold, which you call scientific. An extreme version of this viewpoint (I have actually encountered this) goes so far as to say that logic and evidence themselves are nothing more than instruments of masculine oppression over the “intuitive mind”.

Listen, anthropologist. Just as you entrust your travel to a Boeing 747 rather than a magic carpet or a broomstick; just as you take your tumour to the best surgeon available, rather than a shaman or a mundu mugu, so you will find that the scientific version of truth works. (continue reading…)