From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2001 - 14:21:09 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>The ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture is not really
>an evolutionarily significant amount of time;
In nearly all multicellular animals that's certainly true, but apparently not in humans.
I read your post and then looked at today's issue of Science. I read an article by
Sarah A Tishkoff that reports that the gene that confers resistance to malaria,
the gene that produced sickle cell anemia if inherited from both the father and mother,
only became common 8000 years ago. This indicated that malaria is a much more
recent invention than had been thought, the slash and burn agriculture that started at
that time would have produced stagnate pools of water that were ideal breeding
places for mosquitoes that spread the disease. It also shows that a genetic change
can sometimes spread through the entire human population very quickly.
We already knew that 50 to 100 thousand years, just an instant evolutionarily speaking,
is long enough to make a very noticeable difference in brain size, we're talking about
something that will easily show up in the fossil record. It's not unreasonable to think that
considerably less time could produce a change in the genetic programming of that brain
that bones don't tell us about.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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