Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

uunsuspecting about 2 hours ago 13 commentsRead Article on nature.com

Related: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791282 (64 comments)

https://x.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967 (https://xcancel.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967)

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Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

like_any_other•40 minutes ago

Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.

meroes•29 minutes ago

Dogs?

paulryanrogers•24 minutes ago

Aren't dogs technically one species?

like_any_other•19 minutes ago

I don't think you could have chosen a worse example. Dogs are themselves a subspecies, and are split into many different breeds, of wildly different character and physiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Taxonomy

A_D_E_P_T•about 2 hours ago

Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.

It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.

AlotOfReading•about 1 hour ago

The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs, regardless of the underlying science. Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.

nostromo•34 minutes ago

Science is about truth not social outcomes.

People keep wondering why trust in scientific findings is in free fall. A big part of it is because many scientists have become comfortable lying when they feel it’s for a noble cause.

phainopepla2•21 minutes ago

Is it unpopular on the right? Genuine question. I have only seen people associated with the left deny or downplay this.

jetrink•15 minutes ago

The religious right, specifically. They would say that all people are descended quite recently from Noah and his family.

burnto•15 minutes ago

Evolution itself has some skeptics among the religious right.

mohamedkoubaa•about 1 hour ago

"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."

Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.

nefarious_ends•21 minutes ago

Seriously what’s the point of this comment

sho_hn•about 1 hour ago

And yet you managed to center AI in the discussion.