Inuit meat cache, Kazan River (source: Library and Archives Canada / PA-101294). Because of their high meat diet, hunters produce more body heat than farmers do. Natural selection has thus favored certain mtDNA sequences over others in humans with this profile of heat production. A change in selection pressure may therefore explain, at least in... Read More

Publicly funded misinformation. Source: PBS website In human genetics, a ‘population’ is a group of individuals who share ancestry and hence genes. This sharing is not absolute. There is always some gene flow from outside, and sometimes “outside” means another species. We humans, for example, have received genes not only from Neanderthals and Denisovans but... Read More

It was long thought that human genetic evolution pretty much ended with the advent of culture. As Paul Ehrlich (2000, p. 63) wrote: So did cultural evolution make genetic evolution obsolete? Paul Ehrlich seemed to draw this conclusion … only to pull himself back. “There are many ways in which culture can alter selection pressures,”... Read More