Don McLeroy, the esteemed evolutionary biologist dentist and creationist who serves as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, spent a lot of time last month trying to persuade his fellow board members that scientific evidence for natural selection is wrong. Perhaps he should read this piece from the New York Times:
In a worldwide survey of 50 populations, a team of geneticists has identified many fingerprints of natural selection in the human genome. These are sites on the genome where specific sequences of DNA show signs of having become more common in the population, presumably because they helped their owners adapt to new climates, diseases or other factors.
The genetic regions where natural selection has acted turn out to differ in various populations, doubtless because each has been molded by different local forces on each continent.
“Our work supports the notion that regional populations have adapted in a variety of ways, some shared, some not, to the selective pressures they encountered as they dispersed from the ancestral African homeland some 80,000 years ago,” said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.
The authors of the new study are Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues Joseph Pickrell and Graham Coop. It was published online last month in Genome Research. It is the first to look for signals of selection in DNA samples gathered by the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Science marches on.
(Hat tip: musings)
