Gregory M. Cochran (born 1953) is a physicist and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, known for hypotheses in evolutionary medicine and genetic anthropology. He argues that cultural innovation resulted in new and constantly shifting selection pressures for genetic change, thereby accelerating human evolution. He is co-author of the book The 10,000 Year Explosion.
In opposition to what he sees as the 'conventional wisdom' ...
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Gregory M. Cochran (born 1953) is a physicist and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, known for hypotheses in evolutionary medicine and genetic anthropology. He argues that cultural innovation resulted in new and constantly shifting selection pressures for genetic change, thereby accelerating human evolution. He is co-author of the book The 10,000 Year Explosion.
In opposition to what he sees as the 'conventional wisdom' that civilization has been a static environment which imposed stabilizing selection on humans, Cochran, along with like minded anthropologists such as John D. Hawks, contends that haplotype and other data indicate the selection of genes has been strongest since the advent of farming and civilization.
Cochran and co-authors Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending suggest that the widely observed high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews may be attributed to natural selection for intelligence during the Middle Ages and a low rate of genetic inflow. Cochran et...
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