Still ongoing? Of course.
Huge? Not at all. We had a population bottleneck a few thousands of years ago, and our diversity suffered as a consequence. An extended family of chimpanzees displays more genetic variation than the entire human species:
ADDED: Thinking about it some more I wonder what that means.
Whats huge in human diversity is not the total diversity (at least as compared to chimpanzees) but the amount of increase in diversity over time. It would appear that selection pressure is lower on humans than on champanzees at least in the last centuries.
It’s interesting to think about what society might have been like, if it wasn’t. You’d expect a lot more variation in intelligence along with everything else.
Human genetic diversity is huge and still increasing quickly:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121128132259.htm
I bet half of the ‘deleterious’ mutations mentioned in the article relate to more or less unusual experiences.
Still ongoing? Of course. Huge? Not at all. We had a population bottleneck a few thousands of years ago, and our diversity suffered as a consequence. An extended family of chimpanzees displays more genetic variation than the entire human species:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2012/120302.html
Interesting. That puts it into perspective.
ADDED: Thinking about it some more I wonder what that means.
Whats huge in human diversity is not the total diversity (at least as compared to chimpanzees) but the amount of increase in diversity over time. It would appear that selection pressure is lower on humans than on champanzees at least in the last centuries.
It’s interesting to think about what society might have been like, if it wasn’t. You’d expect a lot more variation in intelligence along with everything else.
Potential novel fodder.
Please someone write it. I love alternate history.