I also read “A Troublesome Inheritance” and was about to recommend it again. It may have been me who brought it up a year ago.

blert Says:
June 15th, 2015 at 6:17 pm

… DNA — and geology – indicate that what is taken as the “White” race …”

Try,

Into, out of, and across the Eurasian steppe

or

Ancient mtDNA from Neolithic France

and

The results of the analyses including additional ancient genomes provide mounting evidence that the Iceman’s genetic affinity with Sardinians reflects an ancestry component that was widespread in Europe during the Neolithic. Despite their different geographic origins, both the Swedish farmer gok4 and the Thracian P192-1 closely resemble the Iceman in their relationship with Sardinians, making it unlikely that all three individuals were recent migrants from Sardinia

Also, for fun.

Hunter-gatherer European had blue eyes and dark skin

“From a single bone — a fragment of the last digit of a small finger, around 0.5 cm by size, found in Altai cave and several dozen millenia old, a whole new species of humans (Denisov man, different from both Homo sapience and Homo neandertal) was established.”

The Denisovans are another example which disproves the old theory that all races share all alleles for all genes only in different frequencies. There are probably hundreds or thousands of unique alleles which are shared among some races but are not present in others.

A group of humans exiting Africa stopped long enough on their migration to mate with one or more Denisovans. According to Wikipedia “about 3% to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians deriving from Denisovans.[5][6][7] ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan

Other humans who left Africa mated with Neanderthals. According to some scientists as much as 40% of Neanderthal DNA survives in the genomes of modern Europeans and Asians. Those genes seem to be absent in modern Africans. By the time they mated the Neanderthal species and homo sapiens were so different that they were “at the edge of biological incompatibility.” In the animal world this is probably similar to the status of coyotes and grey wolves in which only a few offspring have survived to produce a new animal called a coywolf.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/modern-human-dna-neanderthal_n_4689506.html

http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/science-neanderthal-genes-modern-human-dna-01734.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf

The hunter gathering time of humanity and the farming period of humanity, were environmental changes that humans did to themselves more and more. So one extra idea is that evolution wasn’t random mutation, but self directed by human technological changes to the environment, the diet, activity, etc.

This goes back to the main point, which is do people inherit talents unchanged from their ancestors, or do they have to activate the genes for them to acquire the ability? This is related to neural plasticity, since that is one way to determine the productivity of a talent, rather than trying to reverse engineer it from a gene sequence. (If they could do that, they could DNA sequence people into being super humans too once the DNA manipulation techniques become feasible)

The other issue is whether mutation was really random, based merely on environmental factors, or whether it is also due to the human body activating and de activating genes. If mutation is random, then we have survival of the fittest. Dice roll. If mutation is not random, but keyed to genetic inheritance and the environment, then that explains why human genes change when humans change their behavior.

The next question then becomes, when does the change/mutation occur in the lineage?

Thanks for the heads-up on Hawks’ online course on human evolution. I wasn’t aware of it even though I drop in on his great blog every now and then. I read Neo-Necon often as well and my not agreeing completely with her on this subject should not be taken by anyone as a lack of regard for her ideas. I imagine you think the same way.

Since Rachelle and I seem to be reading some of the same things, I’ll also second her recommendation of both John Hawks’s blog and “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.”

Finally, I want to put in a plug for a free online course, taught by Hawks, on human evolution. Hawks does an amazing job of making complex research palatable. The course videos are no longer posted to Coursera.org, but there’s still a web page for the course, so it looks as if it’ll be offered again soon.

Also here is an article from John Hawk’s blog. He specializes in Neandertals and has been featured on several science oriented shows. There has been recent, significant, strong evolution in European brains.

http://www.johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/genetics/brain/lahn_2005_aspm_microcephalin_science.html