Adam Eyre-Walker has published a review of adaptive evolution in
a few well studied systems: Drosophila, humans, viruses,
Arabidopsis, etc. These organisms have been the subject of many
studies that used DNA polymorphism, DNA divergence, or a
combination of the two to detect natural selection in both
protein coding and non-coding regions of the genomes. Now that
we have whole genome sequences for multiple closely related
species from a few different taxa, many researchers are
interested in determining the role of natural selection in the
evolution of DNA sequences. Eyre-Walker claims that the evidence
for adaptive evolution is greater in Drosophila than in humans.
But JP at GNXP thinks that Eyre-Walker doesn’t give the full
story of adaptive evolution in the human genome, leaving out
important examples. Eyre-Walker relates the difference in
adaptive evolution between these two well studied species to
differences in population size; humans have a smaller population
size, therefore they fix less weakly advantag