Are you ready for an evoltionary controversy?

No, not whether or not evolution is true. Go somewhere else for that. I am talking about a recently published book, http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465002218/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235927706&sr=1-1 , that states that, against the conventional wisdom, evolution of man has not stopped in the last 10,000 years but has actually sped up.

For one thing, there are a lot more of us now than there were then, so there is an increased chance of a favorable mutation. They claim that the switch to agriculture was such a major change that it applied increased evolutionary pressure to adapt.

One curious claim that the authors make is that part of the evolutionary explosion was due to having sex with Neanderthals (there is an ugly image for you) and that only a tiny amount of it would have been sufficient to have favorable Neanderthal genes join ours.

Perhaps the most contentious claim is that European Jews evolved just recently to be more intelligent. I can’t summarize the whole argument but I can give an abridged version. There was certainly pressure for the European Jews to evolve. They were barred from land ownership, but were given free reign for a while in more cerebral areas of banking, insurance and other financial areas due to the Biblical injunction against usury. There are unique Jewish genetic diseases that may be of the type where a single copy of a gene gives an advantage but two copies cause a disease, similar to sickle cell anemia. Finally, European Jews score about 12 points higher on IQ tests, which may not seem like much, but can make a large difference once you get two or three standard deviations from the mean and may explain why European Jews account for 25% of Nobel laureates.

In perusing the book in the bookstore I found some of the scientific explanations a bit hard to follow. I will wait till the book hits the local library.