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Genetic evidence for natural selection in humans in the contemporary United States

J. Beauchamp

Published 2016 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance I leverage recent advances in molecular genetics to test directly whether genetic variants associated with a number of phenotypes have been under natural selection in the contemporary United States. My finding that natural selection has been slowly occurring for genetic variants associated with educational attainment and (suggestively, in females) for variants associated with age at menarche provides additional evidence that humans are still evolving—albeit slowly and at a rate that cannot account for more than a small fraction of the large changes that have occurred over the past few generations. Recent findings from molecular genetics now make it possible to test directly for natural selection by analyzing whether genetic variants associated with various phenotypes have been under selection. I leverage these findings to construct polygenic scores that use individuals’ genotypes to predict their body mass index, educational attainment (EA), glucose concentration, height, schizophrenia, total cholesterol, and (in females) age at menarche. I then examine associations between these scores and fitness to test whether natural selection has been occurring. My study sample includes individuals of European ancestry born between 1931 and 1953 who participated in the Health and Retirement Study, a representative study of the US population. My results imply that natural selection has been slowly favoring lower EA in both females and males, and are suggestive that natural selection may have favored a higher age at menarche in females. For EA, my estimates imply a rate of selection of about −1.5 mo of education per generation (which pales in comparison with the increases in EA observed in contemporary times). Although they cannot be projected over more than one generation, my results provide additional evidence that humans are still evolving—albeit slowly, especially compared with the rapid changes that have occurred over the past few generations due to cultural and environmental factors.

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