Human evolution is still going on

Humans are still evolving even though modern housing and sanitation, medical science and a rich and varied diet appear to have largely insulated much of the population from the life-or-death struggle of natural selection, a study has found.

Falling death rates and a decrease in family size in the western world since the start of the industrial revolution 250 years ago have not prevented Darwinian evolution from exerting its effect on the human gene pool, scientists said. They analysed church records of births, marriages and deaths for 10,000 inhabitants of seven parishes in Finland since the beginning of the 18th Century and concluded that evolution is still occurring.

"We are still evolving. As long as some individuals have more children and others have fewer, there is potential for evolution to take place," said Elisabeth Bolund of Uppsala University in Sweden.

"As long as there is variation in the population in terms of reproduction, there will be a difference in reproductive success, which means there's something for natural selection to work on," Bolund said.

Bolund and her colleagues at the universities of Sheffield and Turku in Finland found that cultural influences were not everything because there were small but significant effects caused by genetic inheritance.

They found that between four and 18% of the variations between individuals in lifespan, family size and ages of first and last childbirth were influenced by genes.

"This is exciting because if genes affected differences between individuals in these traits, it means they could change in response to natural selection," Bolund said.

The study, published in the journal Evolution, showed that the genetic influence on timing of when someone is likely to begin a family and the overall size of family has actually risen in recent times compared to 18th and 19th Centuries.

This means that modern humans could still be evolving because people are responding to Darwinian natural selection on the genetic differences between individuals within the population, the scientists said.

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