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posted by martyb on Thursday November 10 2016, @05:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the weak-sauce dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @07:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @07:31PM (#425251)

    If this were true, why weren't there mass defectors from the DNC to vote for Trump?

    What makes you think there weren't?

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 10 2016, @09:19PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday November 10 2016, @09:19PM (#425316) Journal

    I did.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.