Just for a change in topic...

Like it says, we're the three wise men, not three political analysts. I'm bringing out this article because it has a couple of interesting things to say about human evolution, and human evolution is really my main specialty. I know that most of the people I've ever talked to about it do not understand evolution. Even in Star Trek, the concept has been used to signify a "moving upward", as if evolution is naturally pushing us to a higher or better state of existence. This is a good summation here:

One of the most common misunderstandings of evolution is that one species can be "more highly evolved" than another, that evolution is necessarily progressive, or that its converse is "devolution". Evolution provides no assurance that later generations are more intelligent, complex, or morally worthy than earlier generations.

[...]However, there is no guarantee that any particular organism existing today will become more intelligent, more complex, bigger, or stronger in the future. In fact, natural selection will only favor this kind of "progression" if it increases chance of survival. The same mechanism can actually favor lower intelligence, lower complexity, and so on if those traits become a selective advantage in the organism's environment. One way of understanding the apparent "progression" of lifeforms over time is to remember that the earliest life began as maximally simple forms. Evolution could only drive life towards greater complexity, since to become more simple was impossible. Once individual lineages had attained sufficient complexity, however, simplification was as likely as increased complexity. This can be seen in many parasite species, for example, which have evolved simpler forms from more complex ancestors.

The reason I'm mentioning that is so that no-one should misunderstand the claim put forth in the article I linked, which basically, is this:

New evidence suggests humans are evolving more rapidly -- and more recently -- than most people thought possible. But for some radical evolutionists, Homo sapiens isn't morphing quickly enough.

"People like to think of modern human biology, and especially mental biology, as being the result of selections that took place 100,000 years ago," said University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn. "But our research shows that humans are still under selection, not just for things like disease resistance but for cognitive abilities."

Lahn recently published the results of a study demonstrating that two key genes connected to brain size are currently under rapid selection in populations throughout the globe.

[...]Chicago geneticist Lahn is most intrigued by the possibility that cultural factors are involved in brain evolution. "We think some of these new gene variants may be as young as a few thousand years, a period when human culture was changing dramatically," he said. "Maybe these genes are selected not for hunting but because of organized society." He cautioned that this is just a hypothesis, but "recent cultural evolution and biological evolution may be linked."

On the face of it, I don't see any problem with that. Be careful to note, though, that he's still talking about adaptation to the environment. It only stands to reason that in a 100% human-shaped environment, people's adaptations to the environment would of course be those that allowed them to excel in a human society. But also remember that evolution is not a positive pressure so much as a vacuum. Nature does not "build" species. The building blocks of evolution are mutations in genes that are passed on to offspring. But most mutations have neither a positive nor negative affect. Within limits, the shape of your toes has no affect on your survivability nor your reproductive success. Thus, many mutations have built up in the genes that govern shape and size of toes, giving humans a wide variety of feet shapes and sizes. Some mutations are fatal enough that the fetus dies in the womb. Some rare few are beneficial though. It's probably the case that more mutations are harmful than beneficial. I say this because if you envision writing a very complex computer program and then introducing a virus that randomly scrambles letters here and there, most of the time your program will now crash instead of run correctly. It's the rare random resequencing that actually causes it to run better.

Here's a good example: the ability to drink milk. People who come from the "Old World" may just assume that everybody is a milk-drinker because they and everybody they know can and does drink milk (I'm not saying anybody's ignorant, I'm just generalizing here to make a point). But the truth is that many people around the world never domesticated animals, or if they did, they didn't always drink the milk.

"The time scale for a strongly favored mutation to sweep through a population is about 5,000 years," said Jonathan Pritchard, a University of Chicago evolutionary biologist. "It's hard to get an exact estimate for rates of change, but we know that the lactase gene is evolving the fastest in humans. It was new 5,000 years ago and now it's in virtually everybody in Europe."

The lactase gene is what allows humans to metabolize dairy products as adults. It's widely believed to have evolved in response to humans' domestication of dairy animals -- individuals who could enhance their diet with dairy products had such a strong survival advantage that the gene spread at the speed of, well, several thousand generations.

So there's some evidence for humans adapting to living in a human society. In the wild, drinking a cow's milk would not be an option. There are two reasons for this: one, they wouldn't let you near them and two, even if you did get near them, non-domesticated animals are not constantly lactating. Drinking milk is a direct result of people domesticating animals, which only happened because humans became able to sustain themselves with agriculture, a human invention (and don't gripe at me and talk about ants farming aphids, I know, just leave it alone).

A storm of publicity greeted Pritchard's recent paper on signals of selection across the human genome. The response came in large part because Pritchard and his colleagues had found such overwhelming evidence that many human genes are evolving: not just ones that govern the brain, but also ones associated with reproduction, disease resistance and the ability to process certain kinds of foods.

"I think my work is changing people's ideas about evolution, because now natural selection seems to have continued all the way up to the present day," said Pritchard. "There's no reason to think it stops now."

It's true that most people tend to view evolution as no longer being a factor in human development. Again, that's because people tend to misunderstand what evolution is. The most basic definition of evolution would merely be "change". And we know that the genetic make-up of humans is changing. More people are living now than ever did before because of better medicine. That means two things: people who would have died in previous times because of maladaptations are surviving and reproducing, thus passing on their maladaptations, and people who have either harmful, neutral, or beneficial mutations are surviving when in the past many of them would have died of sickness or injury before they could reproduce. Now I have heard the idiotic argument that we are "degrading" the human race by allowing people with, say, Down's Syndrome to live. What that's overlooking is that we are also causing people to survive with adaptations most of us would be in favor of, such as enhanced intelligence, who would otherwise have died in the past because of a diminished immune system. But either way, more mutations are being added and kept and that means increased rate of evolution.

Some scientists are welcoming this trend:

That's why futurists like Kurzweil are excited about Lahn and Pritchard's work -- it could lay the foundations for a new understanding of evolution that's more tolerant of the idea that humans should intervene in their own genetic transformation.

Lahn is comfortable with this idea. "If there's an evolutionary advantage to be had by using technology, then people will do it," he said. "People are going to start changing the game in evolution in ways Darwin never anticipated."

Trans-humanist pundit James Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg, thinks it's time to speed up the evolutionary process.

"You can take what nature gave you, but there's no good reason to take nature as a guide for where you should go in the future," Hughes said.

"People are comforted by the slow pace of biological evolution," said Kurzweil. He predicted that "genetic reprogramming" will soon lead to "dramatic evolutionary changes."

Lahn, for his part, is a "moral relativist" on these issues, but does concede: "Human evolution could soon occur at a rate and with a set of rules that may be very different than what the Darwinian model has characterized so far."