seedmagazine.com: Feature story (bio tech)by Benjamin Phelan

A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change.

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage—but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing. It was as though, having achieved its aim by the seventh day, evolution rested. “That was the stereotype that I learned,” says population geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending. “We showed up 45,000 years ago and haven’t changed since then.” [ read more ]