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Despite Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal interbreeding that has been detected using evidence from modern genomes, weak neanderthal genes are gradually being removed by natural selection, according to researchers:
The Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago, but little pieces of them live on in the form of DNA sequences scattered through the modern human genome. A new study by geneticists at the University of California, Davis, shows why these traces of our closest relatives are slowly being removed by natural selection.
"On average, there has been weak but widespread selection against Neanderthal genes," said Graham Coop, professor in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and Center for Population Biology, and senior author on a paper describing the work published Nov. 8 in the journal PLOS Genetics. That selection seems to be a consequence of a small population of Neanderthals mixing with a much larger population of modern humans.
[...] "The human population size has historically been much larger, and this is important since selection is more efficient at removing deleterious variants in large populations," Juric said. "Weakly deleterious variants that could persist in Neanderthals could not persist in humans. We think that this simple explanation can account for the pattern of Neanderthal ancestry that we see today along the genome of modern humans."
Juric I, Aeschbacher S, Coop G (2016) The Strength of Selection against Neanderthal Introgression. PLoS Genet 12(11): e1006340. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006340
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday November 10 2016, @09:03AM
The "we don't need geeks" part. Yes we bloody well do. The idiot who posted that thinks "the internet" is some freestanding entity made of light and divine fiat. Rather than, as anyone who has worked IT knows, a collection of disparate, oftentimes clashing blinkenlit boxes and gorgons' nests of wires and complex, underdocumented, insecure protocols held together with duct tape and blasphemies in a dozen languages, constantly under siege by evil forces and choked with ad traffic and malware.
The spiralling, fractalling, self-referential irony is enough to make me choke.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @08:27PM
Wait... so it's not a series of tubes?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 10 2016, @09:12PM
That's the most beautiful description of IT reality I've ever read.
Washington DC delenda est.