Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]

vintermann an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The dataset excites me more than the fairly vague conclusion that some SNPs possibly linked to traits were selected for (or hitched along to genes which were selected for). Genetic archaeology is just so much more exciting than this.

But I bet there will be a ton more of that too, thanks to the high quality dataset.

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bcjdjsndon 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How did they decide what made a trait adaptive?

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Metacelsus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

See also the press release: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-revea...

This study covers about 10,000 years of recent human evolution in Europe and West Asia.

From the abstract:

>in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits.

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shadowtree an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Blank Slate hypothesis is now officially refuted, correct?

Different evolutionary paths between races/regions, with impact on mental health and cognitive performance.

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Tor3 an hour ago | parent [-]

Just where did you get that from? Certainly not from the paper.

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kloop 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think they're talking about this bit:

> We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing γ = 0.74 ± 0.12), household income (increasing γ = 1.12 ± 0.12) and years of schooling (increasing γ = 0.63 ± 0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant (Extended Data Fig. 10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years )*, after which γ tends towards zero

Presumably pressure in different regions lead to different combinations of those alleles, which I think they are shorthanding a bit, but the fact that those alleles exist makes blank slate theory a kind of rough assumption

	▲	svnt a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I haven’t had time to really dig in to the paper but these data (from only one region) are limited in their ability to compare regions, right? If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya. The methodology, if it holds up, seems to hold a lot of promise for answering questions like this in the future.

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Nesco 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a graph arguing “intelligence” has been positively selected in west Eurasian population in this paper according to a polygenic score (page 8 fig. 4)

Now I would be quite curious to know how they constructed this polygenic score

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tokai 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Racists are hilarious. They will twist and bend anything remotely applicable to fit and underpin their prejudices.

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bonsai_spool 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Here's the paper - we ideally shouldn't be linking to PDFs of these things but it's paywalled https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1

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damnitbuilds an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I always knew I was smarter than my parents.