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Have humans never stopped evolving?

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From The Scientist:

If there is one common theme in all this recent selection, it is that much of the human diversity we see around us today arose very recently. More than 90 percent of the heritage of every living human comes from sub-Saharan Africa sometime around 100,000 years ago. Fifteen years ago, many geneticists saw this recent common ancestry as evidence that human evolution had mostly drawn to a close. After diverging from our common chimpanzee and bonobo ancestors some 7 million years ago, hominins underwent massive changes in body size, diet, behavior, and brain size. Huge evolutionary innovations marked the beginning of upright walking, tool use, culture, and language. And those changes all happened before 100,000 years ago. (See “Uniquely Human” here.) More.

This article attempts to make the case that humans are still evolving (probably true).

It cites trivial examples such as lactose tolerance and eye/skin colour. These matters are vastly more important culturally than they are physiologically. No mention of anyone growing antlers, for example.

Evolution dogma is a curious thing. I remember reading, a while back, a Darwin-in-the-schools lobby document on how to hector people who have doubts about Darwinism. One point emphasized was that people who say evolution is always happening should be challenged. They are not really “accepting evolution.”

What the pressure group seemed to really mean is that the people who think evolution is always happening do not really accept Darwinian naturalist atheism, which is commonly packaged as “evolution” for schools. (And is the chief source of controversy.)

Common sense would suggest that:

1. Evolution is always happening. (a logical assumption in a transient world)

2. Or else, it happened but has now stopped. (why?)

3. It never happens. (but this is a transient world, so … ?)

The simplest explanation is that evolution is always happening, back and forth. But some really big events (the human mind, for example) defy current explanation. The only reason that the subject of ongoing evolution is a source of contention is the need to cram the facts into a Darwinian narrative.

See also: Why human evolution happened only once: the question no one has to answer

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Comments
Semi OT:
Frogs and humans are kissing cousins - 2010 Excerpt: What's the difference between a frog, a chicken, a mouse and a human? Not as much as you'd think, according to an analysis of the first sequenced amphibian genome. The genome of the western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, has now been analysed by an international consortium of scientists from 24 institutions, and joins a list of sequenced model organisms including the mouse, zebrafish, nematode and fruit fly. What's most surprising, researchers say, is how closely the amphibian's genome resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large swathes of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in these mammals. The results of the analysis are published in Science this week1. "There are megabases of sequence where gene order has changed very little",,, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100429/full/news.2010.211.html
bornagain77
August 6, 2016
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I don't agree we are evolving. We react to needs. Skin/colour of eyes is all reactions to environment and , i say, from triggering mechanisms and nothing to do with selection. We did not come from africa as a first people group. They don't know that. They just presume that from trivial bones they call hominid and presume they were not elsewhere. Its stupid. It really is.Robert Byers
August 5, 2016
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It goes without saying, but if your only hope for universal acceptance of your ideas is to have those ideas flogged into children by the government, then your ideas are fundamentally flawed.EvilSnack
August 5, 2016
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Well, yeah, there are all kinds of weird breeds of dogs and sheep and such, but as soon as you leave them alone you get "reversion to type". Darwin's Finches are now the best documented example of this. We're now closing in on 200 years of CLOSELY watching the birdies, and the longer we watch the LESS they change. One of the strongest opponents of Darwinism was Luther Burbank, who spent most of his professional life pushing the limits of hybridization. And what he saw, consistently, was spectacular hybrids that went just so far and no further. Burbank never claimed to have produced a new species. And of course scientists all over the world have been torturing fruit flies for more than 150 and have never produced a new species of fruit fly. So I believe that Evolution exists SOLELY in the dreams of Evolutionists. Since Evolution MUST be true, our continued failure to PROVE any piece of Evolution IS true is a temporary inconvenience.mahuna
August 5, 2016
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