
A massive genetic study by groups led by Dr. Molly Przeworski and Dr. Joe Pickrell suggests new insight into how the human genome may be evolving. They analyzed the DNA of 215,000 people in the United States and Britain and found that variants linked to Alzheimer’s disease and heavy smoking are less frequent in people with longer lifespans, suggesting that harmful mutations that shorten human lives may be selected against in both populations. This work was published in PLoS Biology and was recently featured in Nature News, where the study was highlighted as “one of the first attempts to probe directly how humans are evolving over one or two generations.”
Read the Nature News article here:
http://www.nature.com/news/massive-genetic-study-shows-how-humans-are-evolving-1.22565
Read the Atlantic article here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/recent-human-evolution/539625/
Read more about the study here:
http://news.columbia.edu/content/1734
Read the original PLoS Biol paper here:
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2002458