Mick Hartley

In my post on Prof Steve Jones's talk about the end of human evolution, I remarked that he'd omitted the most significant factor likely to drive further evolution, sexual selection – or, in more general terms, the effects of culture. Now (via this Metafilter post) here's an article in Seed which, as it were, puts some meat on the bones:

[S]ince the turn of the millennium, genomics has undergone a revolution. With the completion of such landmark studies as the Human Genome Project and the publication of HapMap, scientists finally have access to the particles of evolution. They can inspect vast stretches of DNA from people of all ethnicities, and the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

John Hawks started out as a "fossil guy" studying under Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist who is the leading proponent of the faintly heretical multiregional theory of human evolution. Coming to genetics from such a background has perhaps given Hawks the stomach to wield unfashionable hypotheses. In December of last year, he, Harpending, and others published a paper whose central finding, that evolution in humans is observable and accelerating, would have been nonsensical to many geneticists 20 years ago. Up to 10 percent of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

That Hawks paper was linked to by P.Froward in a comment on my post.

Lots more stuff in the Seed article. A decade or so ago, Steve Jones would have been voicing the common view among geneticists. Now, it seems, he's in the minority.