A little while back I put up a brief post about Steve Jones’ hypothesis that human evolution is slowing. At the time this proposal was on the receiving end of a fair bit of critical discussion on various science blogs.
Now here’s an article by Benjamin Phelan, in Seed magazine, that suggests that the reverse is true – that human evolution is accelerating. (Not in the sense of large-scale morphological changes, but at the level of the genome.) It’s quite a lengthy post, but really interesting & easy to read.
And this debate is an excellent example of how science proceeds – by people putting forward hypotheses & data & seeing them critically analysed by others.
Heraclides says:
There seem to be responses to this popping up all over the place, here’s another: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/evolution/selection/jones-evolution-stopping-2008.html