Scientists at the University of Washington have discovered that the relatively recent advent of new genetic variations has ripened humanity for evolutionary advances.
To be clear, the word "recent" indicates the last 5,000 years, during which time 73 percent of all new genetic variations were conceived. Co-author of the study and geneticist, Joshua Akey, notes that "most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so. there hasn't been much time for random change or deterministic change through natural selection. We have a repository of all this new variation for humanity to use as a substrate. In a way, we're more evolvable now than at any time in our history."
Interestingly, European genes maintain "five times as many gene variants as they would if population growth had been slow and steady," while "people of African descent...[have] three times more variation than would have accumulated under growth-conditions," reports Wired.
During the study, Akey and his team looked at over one million genetic variants. He states, "the genetic potential of our population is vastly different than it was 10,000 years ago."
Cornell geneticist Alon Keinan adds, "Humans today carry a much larger load of deleterious variants than our species carried just prior to its massive expansion just a couple hundred generations ago."
Sarah Tinshkoff of the University of Pennsylvania commends the new research: "There were other hints of what's going on, but nobody has studied such a massive number of coding regions from such a high number of individuals."
The study was published in the journal Nature.
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