David Reich

Is this by infinitesimal change of polygenicity, many genetic variants pushing in the same direction?

That's the mathematician's bias.

Or is it like the example I told you about before with David Gochmann and Leron Carmel with the voice box where everything pushes in the same direction and goes up to 100% and shifts all in the same direction in an incredibly simple and simplistic way?

If you talk to neuroscientists and molecular biologists, their brain tends toward the latter,

And this few examples suggest that maybe that's occurred.

And so maybe this kind of polygenic paradigm of adaptation, when adaptation really matters, is that really what happens when important adaptation happens?

Or is it instead something simple and simplistic and reliant on a small number of genes?

So what I would really like to know is can we mine the genetic data we have

from modern genomes and archaic genomes.

We now have Neanderthals and Denisovans.

We now have some early modern humans who are far enough back in time that appreciable change may have occurred.

And can we actually learn the patterns of biological adaptation well enough to actually read the code of how we change and how we adapt to new pressures?

And I think that that's something that's not impossible to imagine.

We can learn how to do, but it takes a different way of thinking.

So what we're beginning to be able to do, I mean,

I don't know how important the particular class of work I'm involved in right now, but we're engaging with this in some way right now because we have incredible data from Europe in the last 10,000 years with huge numbers of samples where we can watch very small changes in frequency over 10,000 years.

So in this period of time, which is not a particularly important time in human evolution, it's well after the important stuff happened,

It's the last 10,000 years, but it's an eventful time.

The environments became very different.

The lifestyles became very different.