Evidence of Directional and Stabilizing Selection in Contemporary Humans

Overview

Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Specialty Science

Date 2017 Dec 20

PMID 29255044

Citations 56

Authors

Jaleal S Sanjak

Julia Sidorenko

Matthew R Robinson

Kevin R Thornton

Peter M Visscher

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Modern molecular genetic datasets, primarily collected to study the biology of human health and disease, can be used to directly measure the action of natural selection and reveal important features of contemporary human evolution. Here we leverage the UK Biobank data to test for the presence of linear and nonlinear natural selection in a contemporary population of the United Kingdom. We obtain phenotypic and genetic evidence consistent with the action of linear/directional selection. Phenotypic evidence suggests that stabilizing selection, which acts to reduce variance in the population without necessarily modifying the population mean, is widespread and relatively weak in comparison with estimates from other species.

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