December 3, 2008

Cochran and Harpending's new book: "The 10,000 Year Explosion"

Amazon now has a listing for Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending's book, which should be out in January:
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

Much of humanity’s past is a mystery. Until recently, we had only bones and artifacts to help us understand prehistoric human life. But today we have a new window into the past: the historical record that survives in our genes. We can now examine material from our own genomes and analyze it in light of evolutionary theory—a combination Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending call evolutionary genomics. The overwhelming surprise emerging from this new field of research is that human evolution did not stop with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Instead, it sped up—and has continued accelerating into historical times.

The 10,000 Year Explosion
is the first book to introduce the new ideas coming from evolutionary genomics that will revolutionize humanity’s understanding of its past. Harpending and Cochran reveal the genetic changes that led to behaviorally modern humans and that allowed our ancestors to adapt to new environments. The majority of these changes, including adaptations to physical and social inventions such as agriculture and urban environments, seem to have started in a huge burst only 10,000 years ago. Cochran and Harpending make clear that many of the important transitions in human history involved biological changes that were the products of natural selection.

Full of revelatory and wondrous findings, The 10,000 Year Explosion proves that humanity’s genetic inheritance can change remarkably fast—and that our own civilization can cause the change.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

10 comments:

  1. I just ordered my copy. This looks like a classic!

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  2. OT: Steve, how about an article on Obama refusing to show his damn birth certificate?

    I thought this issue was total tinfoil but the obama team is acting textbook guilty. They are acting so guilty one has to wonder what the hell they are hiding.

    This article from americanthinker.com lays out the fishy details of the story.

    Why the Barack Obama Birth Certificate Issue Is Legitimate

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  3. The archives of the Honolulu newspaper have a birth announcement for Obama, dated a few days after his birth, showing him to have been born in a local hospital. It's a REAL stretch of the imagination to imagine that Obama's parents placed a fake announcement in the paper to ensure that he'd be eligible to run for President more than 40 years in the future.

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  4. Well, I certainly hope they filled their bibliography with the appropriate cites of Diamond, Gould and Lewontin! It would be a tragic denial of human accomplishment for Harpending and Cochran to snub their betters!

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  5. Bad guys throughout Europe - of many disciplines - were, up until the 40s, talking this up for a long time. C & H will, I'm sure, give some good scientific data on the subject, yet it's hardly revolutionary. Not that everything has to be. Just saying. You know, to fill up the comments section.

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  6. "yet it's hardly revolutionary."

    If you don't buy a copy, you'll never know.

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  7. "If you don't buy a copy, you'll never know."

    LOL. You got me Cochran. Okay, I'll buy a copy, but it'd better be good - good enough to get you arrested in Europe good.

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  8. So, shamed into buying C & H's book moments ago, I head over to Amazon to do so, and see that "Customers Who've Bought This Item Have Also Bought Blah Blah" section. Included is one "Evil Genes" about the innate "evil" of certain men, with a whole crew of slobbering academics blabbling about how insightful the book is. "Evil Mao", "Evil Milosevic". Ugh. I pray "The 10,000 Year Explosion", doesn't use such Disney terms. Some of us prefer science.

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  9. Dr. Cochran,

    You want me to buy your book? Tell me it says were the Neanderthals are. Where?

    Tell ME!!!

    Armenia? They're a hairy folk, and have a reputation for smarts. But they're pretty gracile.

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