Human evolution

[poser765]

Certainly not definitively. Care to correct me?

Man, I'm not going to google, so maybe my argument is flawed, but God damn, sure it's not a proven fact just like the impossibility of traveling faster than light is not a proven fact. It is FAR from an abstract concept. Is there a single a single legitimate scientist, scientific body, or orginization that doesn't acknowledge evolution as the current ruling theory of the origin of our species?

[The Ogdru Jahad]

Evolution takes millions of years, and I can't see any noticeable changes taking place in our species that would lead to the entire population "evolving" but with technology and genetic manipulation, we're going to be artificially forcing evolution.

[Osmeric]

Certainly not definitively. Care to correct me?

Now that we can read human genomes, scientists have been finding evidence ("linkage disequilibrium") of positive selection. This is the bread and butter of natural selection.

One example are mutations for lactase persistence. Lactase, the enzyme that allows a mammal to digest milk sugar (lactose), is, in most mammals, only produced when the animal is young. In adults, expression of the gene for lactase is turned off.

But in some human populations, a mutation has arisen that causes lactase to be expressed even in adults. These populations are those that adopted a pastoral lifestyle, raising animals, such as cows, for their milk. In some places, pastoralism allowed up to five times as much food energy to be produced from a given parcel of land, vs. raising animals for slaughter. The selective advantage to being able to digest milk was huge. In Scandinavia, as much as 90% of the population has this mutation.

Because the mutation is recent (estimated to have occurred in the last 7K years or so), recombination has not had a chance to remove the linkage of the mutation to nearby genes. As a result, genetic variation near the mutation is reduced. This is the telltale sign of recent positive selection.

There are many other examples of such linkage disequilibrium being found. In most cases the driving mutation has not yet been identified, but the pattern is there nonetheless.

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Evolution takes millions of years

This is incorrect.