



Pass it on



If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906199106) the pavilia bay.

Decoding culture

It's hard to say what is selecting for these traits, and to discern whether they are being passed down through the women's genes, but because Stearns controlled for many social and cultural factors, it is likely that his results document genetic, rather than cultural evolution at work.

It is not the first study to conclude that natural selection is operating on humans today; the difference is that much of the earlier work has drawn that conclusion from geographic differences in gene frequencies, rather than from direct measurements of reproductive success. That leaves Stearns's study as perhaps the most detailed measure of evolution in humans today reenex HGF.


