Cochran and Harpending Interview

Briefly Noted

I mentioned this in the comments of the previous thread. The Cochran and Harpending interview about their new book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution can be found here (part one), here (part two), here (part three), here (part four), and here (part five).

Briefly: The book is a discussion of the last 10,000 years of human evolution. Cochran and Harpending’s contention is that humans have continued to evolve — and in significant ways — over this period of time. This makes for quite a contrast to the story many of us were raised on, namely that human evolution essentially stopped around 40-50,000 years ago, and that any changes that have taken place since are so superficial as to be insignificant. Cochran and Harpending argue not only that human evolution has continued, and in ways that are indeed significant, but that it has been accelerating thanks to the pressures brought to bear on our genome by civilization.