Humanity's Recent Evolution
It's easy to think that modern life has slowed human evolution, but the opposite is true. Most of humanity's genetic variation has accumulated in the last few thousand years during a period of extraordinary population growth. As a species, we're more evolvable than ever.
In the figure above, taken from an in-depth genetic analysis of 6,515 people, the amount of genetic variation collectively present at each location in the human genome is tabulated from before (left) and after (right) the population boom.
Citation: “Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants.” By Wenqing Fu, Timothy D. O’Connor, Goo Jun, Hyun Min Kang, Goncalo Abecasis, Suzanne M. Leal, Stacey Gabriel, David Altshuler, Jay Shendure, Deborah A. Nickerson, Michael J. Bamshad, NHLBI Exome Sequencing Project & Joshua M. Akey. Vol. 491, No. 7426, 29 November 2012
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