Why the human race is growing apart

[AngryAmish]

"Races have evolved away from each other over the past 10,000 years, according to new research that challenges standard ideas about the biological significance of ethnicity.

A genetic analysis of human evolution has shown that rather than slowing to a standstill it has speeded up, with different pressures on different populations pushing racial groups further apart. Scientists behind the findings suggest that European, African and Asian populations grew genetically more distinct from each other over several thousand years, as their environments took them down different evolutionary paths.

This would call into question the popular scientific view that race has little or no biological meaning, as the genetic similarities between ethnic groups greatly outweigh differences."

and

The study shows that over the past 5,000 years, new genetic variants have been emerging at a rate 100 times faster than in any other period of human evolution."

[Jim__]

1. My reading of that article is that we shouldn't be growing apart now.

That's my understanding of this:

Armand Leroi, Reader in Evolutionary Biology at Imperial College, London, said: “In principle, this could have led to speciation if it had continued. In practice, it has got to be the case that that cannot happen now. The reason is that this study has looked at largely separated populations in the past, but everything about human history since the Industrial Revolution weighs overwhelmingly against separation and thus against speciation too. Huge increases in gene flow are going to wipe this trend out.”

I don't find it surprising that when humans were separated onto different continents there would be genetic drift. However, we are not nearly so separated today.