Natural Selection Leaves Fresh Footprints on a Canadian Island

On the island, Île aux Coudres, a small French Canadian island north of Quebec, scientists have discovered what may be the most recent sign of human evolution in response to natural selection. The research leader, Dr. Milot, said the genetic changes in his study showed up so clearly because the island was held to certain social conditions because of the isolation from the general population. The island is composed of about 30 families who arrived between 1720 and 1773. Throughout the period, considerable equality was maintained, and the population lacked the gradations of wealth that can influence who has how many children. Also, because most people married locally, the island’s population became considerably inbred, despite a ban on marrying first or second cousins. These two factors, and the homogeneity of the population, left the field open for genetic effects to become prominent. The local church holds complete record of births, marriages and deaths. From this data, the researchers have extracted the histories of women born on the island between 1799 and 1940. Over this 140-year period, the age at which a woman had her first child, a highly heritable trait, went from 26 to 22 years of age. Because of this change, women on average had four more children during their reproductive lifetime, the researchers report. Data from the human genome in the last decade has shown the fingerprints of natural selection are visible across at least 10 percent of the genome. Summarizing the results of 14 such studies, Stephen C. Stearns of Yale wrote that “the emerging picture is that selection is acting in postindustrial societies to reduce age at first reproduction in both sexes, to increase age at menopause in females and to improve traits such as total blood cholesterol that are associated with the risk of disease and mortality.” With this selective environment, this population was able to mutate at a more rapid rate due to natural selection, skipping multiple generations.

This article is very interesting because it shows the potential that evolution still posses. Although many scientists criticize that humans are exchanging civilizations and technology for the ability to evolve through natural selection, this proves that we still have that ability. It would be interesting to see if another research group could work with a very small, concentrated population on a remote island and see if they can also speed up the process of evolution. This also shows the greater impact of are technology, and how we have sacrificed the natural process of development to almost take “short cuts” in life. This could also be possibly used as a model to see what is to come to the general population. It is possible that as we observe this concentrated population, we will learn the outcome of the evolution of the general population in relation to the speedy evolution on the island.

Overall I found this article to be a very interesting story, however they did not go into a good amount of detail. Wade constantly referred to the statistics and data that were collected but did not exactly explain how they were created and analyzed. It would have been nice to see those specifics. However, he did a very good job at explaining the basic concept of how the genomes were able to evolve at this rapid rate for someone who is not familiar with the topic.

Wade, Nicholas. "Natural Selection Leaves Fresh Footprints on a Canadian Island." New York Times. 3 Oct. 2011. Web. 3 Oct. 2011. .