John Hawks

John Hawks

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acceleration

Did two pulses of evolution supercharge human cognition?
An intriguing new study tries to tabulate the ages of genetic variants associated with human phenotypes, but its claims about recent brain evolution may…
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John Hawks
Explaining the X chromosome hole in Neandertal ancestry
Natural selection reduced the variation on human X chromosomes in populations with the most Neandertal and Denisovan mixture. It may have been meiotic…
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John Hawks
Recent adaptive evolution to resist the toxic effects of arsenic
Examining a study by Carina Schlebusch and coworkers into the peoples of northern Argentina.
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John Hawks
David Attenborough says humans have stopped evolving. He's wrong
The famous documentarian has some strong views about the potential of our species, but he overlooks the diversity of environments we have created.
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John Hawks
Growing genetic data suggest a two-phase model for prehistoric population expansions in Africa
I describe results from two papers of African genetic variation, which show that the population growth from agriculture followed an earlier demographic…
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John Hawks
How much of human evolution was due to polygenic adaptation?
Selection on most human traits is likely to result in small shifts in frequency on many different genetic loci.
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John Hawks
Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I look into arguments by the geneticist Steve Jones that human evolution has stopped. It hasn't.
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John Hawks
Our new paper on why human evolution accelerated
I run through our 2007 work on evidence for recent natural selection across the human genome.
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John Hawks
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