#change
"Over the last 50,000 years, modern humans have been subjected to enormous evolutionary pressures, in part from the consequences of their own social culture. They explored new ranges and climates and developed new social structures. Fast adaption, particularly to new social structures, was required as each population strove to exploit its own ecological niche and to avoid conquest by its neighbors. The genetic mechanism that made possible this rapid evolutionary change was the soft sweep, the reshaping of existing traits by quick minor adjustments in the sets of alleles that controlled them. But what began as a single experiment with the ancestral human population became a set of parallel experiments once the ancestral population had spread throughout the world. These independent evolutionary paths led inevitably to the different human populations or races that inhabit each continent."
React to this quote
More by Nicholas Wade
See allResonant Thoughts
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"How would your life be different if…You stopped worrying about things you can’t control and started focusin…"
— Steve Maraboli"We humans have many vestigial features proving that we evolved. The most famous is the appendix."
— Jerry Coyne"Land and water management should be given ‘Number One' priority for achieving evergreen revolution. No less…"
— M. S. Swaminathan"The large establishment of wives and servants rendered the nobles immobile. No Indian scholars, engineers o…"
— K. S. Lal"Of the two contradictory aspects, one must be principal and the other secondary. The principal aspect is th…"
— Mao Zedong"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place."
— Ignazio Silone