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How Evolution Is Evolving: Two scientists look at how the Jews got their smarts.

Publication: The Futurist
Publication Date: 01-JUL-09 		Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: How Evolution Is Evolving: Two scientists look at how the Jews got their smarts.(The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution)(Book review)

Article Excerpt
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Basic Books. 288 pages. $27.

Mainstream science maintains that humans stopped evolving about 50,000 years ago. Civilization put an end to process. Therefore, the human of the pre-modern era is the human of today and will be the human tomorrow, right? Not so fast, say scientists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. In The 10,000 Year Explosion, they argue that humankind is evolving even faster in the modern age. We developed new genetic traits as recently as the Middle Ages. The Ashkenazi (or European) Jews, for instance, don't just seem smarter; they demonstrate a genetic predisposition toward higher intelligence.

Cochran and Harpending open the book by disputing the common perception of evolution as an inexorably slow process. Natural selection, they assert, does not always transpire over the course of multiple millennia. In fact, an evolutionary leap can be quite fast under certain conditions where organism and challenging environment converge. Such a combination can result in an explosion of genetic variation, especially when species intermingle, as humans interbred...

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