Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive performance.
> We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing γ = 0.74 ± 0.12), household income (increasing γ = 1.12 ± 0.12) and years of schooling (increasing γ = 0.63 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant (Extended Data Fig. 10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years )*, after which γ tends towards zero
Presumably pressure in different regions lead to different combinations of those alleles, which I think they are shorthanding a bit, but the fact that those alleles exist makes blank slate theory a kind of rough assumption
If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya.
The methodology, if it holds up, seems to hold a lot of promise for answering questions like this in the future.
Now I would be quite curious to know how they constructed this polygenic score
What you think the implications are of that for your present day lived experience, that might be a different conversation.
But that's a strawman. Racism is wrong, even if there are minor genetic variances across populations (which... seems obvious?) Variance within a population strongly dominates the weak cross-population effects, and personal history (nutrition, education, etc) strongly dominates that.
And that's setting aside the moral implications of judging someone or changing your behavior towards them even if you have somehow measured them to be "less intelligent," as if that was a single axis of worth.
Because, apparently, this needs to be said.
But I bet there will be a ton more of that too, thanks to the high quality dataset.
Interesting. I find that part of the paper the most exciting. We always knew selection would happen for valuable traits. But seeing demonstrations of it in the timelines we have is pretty important.
Metacelsus•2h ago
This study covers about 10,000 years of recent human evolution in Europe and West Asia.
From the abstract:
>in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.