Good news this week for believers in common sense, opponents of intelligent design, and, incidentally, for writers of columns about natural selection.
First, Japanese volunteers have helped to provide evidence that natural selection has been tinkering with our genetic makeup far more recently than might be supposed. And second, over in Tennessee, feted for country & western music and mocked as a stronghold of the "intelligent design" movement, new evidence has emerged that natural selection is the driving force behind the origin of species.
First the news about recent natural selection. That's "recent," by the way, in the sense that evolutionary biologists use the word, meaning in the last 10,000 years. Researchers at the University of Chicago combed the genomes of 209 people from Japan, China, Nigeria and several European countries, and looked for genetic variations that signal recent evolution. They found more than 700 genes that showed evidence of having evolved at some time in the last 10,000 years.