Authored by David Randall via RealClearScience,
The latest report from David Reich’s genetics lab at Harvard is that “Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia.” In other words, humans have been continuing to evolve in Europe and the Middle East for the last 10,000 years, with significant effect. Reich’s paper broadly substantiates the thesis of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Civilization hasn’t ended biological evolution, but proceeds alongside it.
Reich’s genome-wide association study (GWAS) indicates that West Eurasians have increased or reduced their vulnerability to a variety of ailments. Genetic changes have rendered them less susceptible to leprosy, rheumatoid arthritis, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, and moreso to coeliac disease and gout. At the same time, there has been positive selection for fair skin, red hair, and intelligence, and negative selection for male-pattern baldness. In summary, West Eurasians have grown foxier, as the arc of their genetic history bends toward fluffy ginger genius.
Reich’s conclusions are pretty likely to hold water. Too many scientific and social scientific fields have been affected by the irreproducibility crisis of modern science. The worst-hit disciplines use far too loose a definition of statistical significance, p < 0.05. Genome-wide association studies, by contrast, tend to use the extraordinarily tighter standard of p < 5 × 10^ −8. Reich lab’s research includes a variety of different standards of statistical significance, including some that are only of p < 8.9 × 10^ −5. That standard is orders of magnitude more reliable than most research.
The data Reich’s lab can work with, after all, is remarkably bounteous. As the researchers wrote:
[W]e increased power through a 14-fold increase in sample size, driven by 10,016 ancient individuals for whom we report new data, which combined with previously reported data yields a dataset of 15,836 people spanning 18,000 years … The final dataset included 8,074,573 SNPs [single-nucleotide polymorphisms] and 1,665,051 insertions or deletions (indels) on chromosomes 1–22.
Science only can advance on sure foundations when you’re reasonably likely the research will hold up. Sociology, psychology, any discipline where you cannot work with millions of pieces of data, cannot be expected to match GWAS levels of rigorous statistical significance. But, as many scientists have proposed, p < 0.01 or p < 0.005 are not impossible goals, even for disciplines less rich in data. Reich’s peers in other disciplines should look at his work and consider the benefits of reasonable certainty that a paper you publish actually says something true.
Americans in general might also take Reich’s work as a prompt to reconsider our various moratoria on using American Indian biological data to provide gene samples. Reich’s report on West Eurasian genetic data presumably is only a beginning. We may expect reports to come on East Eurasians, Sub-Saharan Africans, Aboriginal Australians, Khoisan in South African, American Indians in Latin America—reports on people all over the world.
Except on the American Indians of the United States.
Our legal, regulatory, and cultural inhibitions mean that there will be an enduring blank spot in the knowledge we gain from the genetics revolution—knowledge which will aid not only paleogenetic research but also advances in medicine tailored to each individual’s DNA. American Indians might be the last people on Earth to benefit from such advances in genetically individuated medicine if we continue to veto researchers’ use of American Indian genetic and paleogenetic data.
Science funders also should note that science proceeds by joint work in many disciplines and isn’t just a high-tech plaything. The Reich lab’s research depended not least upon “10,016 ancient individuals for whom we report new data.” Those individuals didn’t just show up in laboratories by magic. They came there by careful work by archaeologists, by intelligent observations from interested amateurs, by hard and careful work in caves, in ancient graves, and in sudden gullies opened by rainstorms. Brawn, physical finesse, and something of the Indiana Jones spirit of adventure were as important for making this research possible as microscopes and microchips. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags: no dig, no data. We all should remember that, too.
David Randall is the Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.