3 ms·
After millions of years of being forced to use our wits to survive combined with periods of inbreeding (resulting in a relatively narrow genome), humans are now
by paulshort 17y ago
After millions of years of being forced to use our wits to survive combined with periods of inbreeding (resulting in a relatively narrow genome), humans are now a super-race of genetic mutants ahead of our time on the evolutionary scale. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if being too smart for our own good contributed to our demise.
Edit: By "inbreeding" I mean - if the human population were reduced to a few thousand breeding individuals, and those individuals were also spreading or migrating into different areas of Africa, the middle East, Europe, etc. at the same time, that would mean much smaller groups of people who breed within their "community." It may have been thousands or tens of thousands of years before those different communities met up with each other and combined genetic material again.
- ramchip 17y agoWouldn't inbreeding cause the opposite of a super-race? Inheriting different genes from both parents can prevent a lot of problems; for example the fact that women have two copies of the X chromosome makes them a lot less likely to be color blind. Having a uniform gene pool means that people would end up with similar genes and be more likely to have diseases. I'm not sure if/why recombining after a long period of isolation and mutation would be better than staying together and just sharing mutations gradually. It's an interesting question though, there's problem some research paper somewhere that could tell us...