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A comment on The Brain Is Hardwired to Snap. Parent comment

Re:The Brain Is Hardwired to Snap by Retric on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @12:05PM (#11074141)
For clarity, 500 generations is easily enough for some things to shift frequency, but I agree it would be fast for a mutation to go global. However, thrown weapons are on the order of ~20,000+ generations which is plenty of time for mutation and adaptation.

As to testing, I suspect we are going to get good at decoding and editing human DNA fairly soon which is going to have a lot to say about these debates. This stuff is either there or not, when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.

EX: Domestic cattle are also around 500 generations old and lactose tolerance has been spreading. http://www.foodbeast.com/news/map-of-milk-consumption-lactos... lactose tolerance: 96% in Sweden, 10% in China.

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Re:The Brain Is Hardwired to Snap by astazangasta on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @07:53PM (#11077487)
>when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.

I don't think new data will help. We know the changes in the human lineage; even if we knew their functional meaning, we cannot conclude whether they are adaptive or not; fixed alleles reveal little about their fixation time, etc.

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Re:The Brain Is Hardwired to Snap by soperj on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @12:37PM (#11074386)
They believe the haast eagle evolved from the little eagle diverging just 700 000 years ago. That's going from one of the smallest eagles(0.8kgs) to the largest (11.5-14kgs) in under a million years.
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