Should-Read: Yair Field et al.: Detection of human adaptation during the past 2000 years

Should-Read: Blond hair and blue eyes driven by connections with Vitamin D uptake, or sexual selection–but where would that come from? Spending more energy and sophistication in the MHC driven by increased vulnerability to diseases as we crowd together? The evolution of lactose tolerance is the only one that seems intuitive to me…

Yair Field et al.: Detection of human adaptation during the past 2000 years: “in the ancestors of modern Britons during the past ~2,000-3,000 years…

…we see strong signals of selection at lactase and the MHC, and in favor of blond hair and blue eyes. For polygenic adaptation we find that recent selection for increased height has driven allele frequency shifts across most of the genome. Moreover, we identify shifts associated with other complex traits, suggesting that polygenic adaptation has played a pervasive role in shaping genotypic and phenotypic variation in modern humans.