I've been posting teasers for awhile about an upcoming big paper on evolution co-written by the Murderer's Row of Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, John Hawks, Bob Moyzis, and Eric Wang. It officially comes out Monday evening, Dec. 10, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
I'm not going to say anymore about it now so that the big boys at the NYT and The Economist can have time to write their stories without anyone jumping the gun ... other than to leave you with a Cochran quote as the title of this post.
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8 comments:
That title's too much. Now I won't get this out of my head and I'll be up all night.
Mutagens in burnt (cooked) or preserved foods?
"I'm not going to say anymore about it now so that the big boys at the NYT and The Economist can have time to write their stories without anyone jumping the gun ..."
Bad idea Steve. You know those "big boys" are really clueless and most probably read your blog to get an idea of what's going on. So if you jump the gun then maybe for once we get some sense into those two MSM propaganda machines.
So googleing for that phrase finds this in google's cache, though the original article has been removed. Softpedia has a copy also.
"Human races are evolving away from each other," Harpending says. "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity."
I still can't get this out of my mind. It's as though Cochran et al. are coming out with some radical new libertarian explanation of evolution.
Really, maybe mutation's a good thing, and I should light up a cigar, load a round in the chamber and open a bottle of whiskey -- could the ATF of population genetics be what drives progress?
Publish it already!
It's too bad Hunter S. Thompson is dead, because he would have loved this stuff. How's Tom Wolfe doing BTW?
Is this the Jay Leno (Living Neandertal) worthy paper or is that still two or three down the line? The Welsh, Aran Islanders or none of the above?
Let's see, dumb last-minute quesion. Is there something about the northern latitudes or the skin texture developed to survive in them that made it easier for the background radiation to penetrate the body and jostle the electrons in DNA atoms and thus increase the rate of mutations?
Let me guess... macrocephalic mutants?
Modern humans are basically "homines erecti" with larger heads?
Erectus+ macrocephaly = Sapiens?
Or did the mutation occur during the Neolithic and has to do with agriculture and animal husbandry?
Lots of pesky viruses could have culled the human population during those crazy neolithic times.
Given the title, I'm going to have to stick with the nitrosamine explanation. Lord knows I've wolfed down tons of those molecules, and I've thought about the implications of this concerning human evolution before. I just assumed that mass consumption of these compounds started longer than 40k years ago, but I'm not an expert on these things.
I guess I'll just have to wait and see what Cochran came up with.
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