12.20.07
Recent human evolution? The eonic effect!
Recent human evolution
This new spate of articles on recent human evolution are deflecting attention from some basic problems: can such rapid changes be ascribed to natural selection?
Also, the examples given, while of great interest, do not address anything particularly major: man as man is essentially in a state of realization (anatomically) of the ‘basic man’ who has remained relatively static since–the Great Explosion?
But most of all the discussion is blind to what is the real ‘evolution’ in the past ten thousand years, visible in the eonic effect in the emergence of the Neolithic/civilization, then the Axial Age. Because the definition is calibrated to genetics scientists are looking at the fine detail and missing the overall picture.
The eonic effect shows us how evolution is indeed visible in recent times, but this is a spectacular macrohistorical driver process, and not connected, as far as we know, with genetics.
Until the emergence of agriculture 5,000 to 11,000 years ago, human ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers or foragers. Proponents of “evolutionary psychology” assume that most of our genetic evolution occurred before the transition to agriculture. Since then, there has been much cultural change but almost no genetic change.
But there are some good examples of how cultural changes over the past 10,000 years have brought about genetic evolution. One example is how human populations in dairying cultures have evolved genetically so that adults can digest fresh milk, because their bodies produce the lactose-digesting enzyme lactase. In China and most of Africa, most people cannot digest milk in adulthood because their ancestors did not belong to dairying societies.