Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

The principal mutation, found among Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic groups of Kenya and Tanzania, arose 2,700 to 6,800 years ago, according to genetic estimates, Dr. Tishkoff’s group is to report in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday. This fits well with archaeological evidence suggesting that pastoral peoples from the north reached northern Kenya about 4,500 years ago and southern Kenya and Tanzania 3,300 years ago.

Two other mutations were found, among the Beja people of northeastern Sudan and tribes of the same language family, Afro-Asiatic, in northern Kenya.

Genetic evidence shows that the mutations conferred an enormous selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 times as many descendants as people without them. The mutations have created “one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection yet reported in humans,” the researchers write.

The survival advantage was so powerful perhaps because those with the mutations not only gained extra energy from lactose but also, in drought conditions, would have benefited from the water in milk. People who were lactose-intolerant could have risked losing water from diarrhea, Dr. Tishkoff said.

Click here for the rest.

Yay! I finally got the word "diarrhea" into one of my posts.

This looks very much like a smoking gun in the evolution versus creation "debate." For real scientists, evolution has already been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but creationists like to mix things up, taking laymen down fool's paths in terms of logic, sounding reasonable, but being anything but. That is, creationists fraudulently insist that science deals only with direct observation; because the overall evolution of human beings took millions of years, it's generally impossible to directly observe the process--by creationist debating rules, one can't prove that evolution is a fact. People who have even the most minimal understanding of how science actually functions know that evolution is a fact because of hundreds of thousands of concrete scientific inferences, but, obviously, that's not good enough for the creationists. This news comes much closer to direct observation. A whole lot of argumental bullshit can now be avoided by pulling this story out. What the hell can they say to refute it?

I mean, it's fucking DNA, and Johnny Cochran is dead. What can they do?

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