Selective Pressure, Selective Silence
12th June 2026
Human evolution, particularly of the brain, ended a long time ago—at least that is what many educated people, wary of claims about biological differences between human groups, prefer to believe. For much of the postwar era, it was widely assumed that natural selection had largely ceased to shape human populations and that any evolution during the past ten millennia was too slow or too slight to detect. That view was partly shaped by evidence and partly shaped by history. After World War II, the horrors of Nazi racial science made claims about human biological variation radioactive, and for good reason. But a justified rejection of racial typologies often hardened into a broader assumption: that natural selection had lost its grip on humans, and that differences between populations were mostly superficial.
A landmark study published in Nature in April has complicated that narrative. Drawing on ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 West Eurasians spanning 10,000 years, Harvard geneticist David Reich and colleagues found evidence that directional genetic selection is not only widespread but accelerating. Rather than stasis, evolution has continued to act on hundreds of genetic variants associated with traits ranging from disease risk and body composition to complex behavioural measures, including intelligence.
While the paper itself is technical and cautious, its implications are explosive. Importantly, the selection identified in the study occurred within populations inhabiting distinct ecological and cultural environments, suggesting that recent human evolution has been shaped by local selective pressures rather than a uniform global process. That, in turn, raises the possibility of ongoing regional divergence between different human groups. This has already dragged an older, more troubling word back into the discussion—“race”. This is not the sloppy popular notion based on skin colour or a rigid biological essence. Human genetics substantially overlaps among groups, rendering classical racial categories obsolete. But this provocative research does underscore that many human differences may not be simply skin deep.
Evolution never stops, in the same way that markets never go away. Humans can affect evolution, chiefly by preserving the lives of people who would otherwise die before they reproduce, but also by aborting babies for convenience (and we have no idea how THAT will work out….).
June 12th, 2026 at 06:04
Eugenics is actually entirely logical and noble, frankly, if you want to improve the species, but the stupids don’t want you to know that, because, well….
Vox Day had an interesting couple posts over the last month or 3 on his blog, about how genetically we’re at a dead-end due to chromosome mixing, evolution, and a bunch of stuff that went well over my head rather quickly… but was interesting thought exercise, what I could keep up with.