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" Just how evolved are you? Bruce Lahn is trying to find out. The thirty-seven-year-old native of China, who as a college student led pro-democracy rallies in Beijing in the late 1980s, is now an assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago. Ten years ago, he helped map the human Y chromosome--a discovery that could lead to male birth control. Recently he published a significant study that shook up conventional ideas of how evolution proceeds. Now he has set out to solve an even greater mystery: What makes humans &amp;quot;human&amp;quot;? It&amp;#039;s an investigation into the depths of the human brain that broaches more questions than it answers. Are all humans equally evolved? (No.) Could we someday change that? (Yes.) Do we want to?  People have always wondered why humans are so special as a species. Six million years ago, humans and chimps were one species. Yet for some reason they diverged. Chimps pretty much stayed chimps. Yet the human brain exploded in both size and complexity. My work is trying to figure out why and how this happened.  Our lab&amp;#039;s first major discovery, about a year ago, was that the human brain had evolved much more rapidly and from many more gene mutations than was once thought. This implied that the selection for a better brain must have been very intense during human evolution. We decided to try to track down and study some of the genes that might have contributed to this accelerated evolution. We eventually homed in on ASPM and microcephalin, two genes that are critical regulators of brain size during development. We conducted two extensive studies of the genes using subjects representing all the major indigenous populations of the world. By analyzing the slight differences in the genes among many, many people, we were able to deduce how they evolved over time and trace them back to their original copies. More, we found that in each of these two genes there is a new mutational variant that emerged and spread in the very recent past of human history, because it confers a strong fitness advantage. In effect, we caught the process of evolution in action. For microcephalin, the new variant is present in higher frequency in people outside of Africa (where modern humans first appeared) as compared with Africans. For ASPM, the new variant has higher frequency in Europe and the Middle East than in other parts of the world.  Perhaps most remarkable is how young these new mutational variants were in evolutionary terms. The new variant in microcephalin can be traced to a single genetic copy in one human just 37,000 years ago. This is 160,000 years after humans as a species first arrived on this planet. And from that single copy, 70 percent of world populations now have the variant. The case of ASPM is even more extraordinary. The new variant first appeared fifty-eight hundred years ago and has since risen from a single copy to about 30 percent of world populations today. Recorded civilization began in Mesopotamia between five thousand and six thousand years ago. Agriculture was invented and spread from there ten thousand years ago. So by the time this new variant of ASPM appeared, humans were already becoming culturally and behaviorally modern. And yet they were still evolving--as we are today.  One question I&amp;#039;ve been asked many times is whether one could conclude from our data that Europeans and Middle Easterners are somehow more evolved than others. I think this is a false and dangerous assumption for a few reasons. First, we don&amp;#039;t know the true biological and cognitive effects of having these new variants. We know they are associated with a significant fitness advantage, but that doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily mean that they make a person smarter. More, even if we assume that having the new variants of ASPM and microcephalin may on average make a person smarter, those are just two genes of many--perhaps a few dozen--that are driving human brain evolution. We are a long way away from knowing who has what. In the end, it could all come out in a wash.  Nevertheless, our research does pose some serious social and moral questions. In ten or twenty years we may identify more genes that contribute to cognitive differences among humans, and we may indeed find that some populations have on average more of the advantageous variants in these genes. How are we going to use this information? And should we even be going after that information? I have no doubt my research could be used as ammunition by people who have argued in the past that this line of research shouldn&amp;#039;t be done. But I think that eventually knowledge will triumph over ignorance. We&amp;#039;re talking about learning basic knowledge about ourselves. We&amp;#039;ve already acquired the ability to change our environment in a way our ancestors could only dream of. And now we are unlocking the tools to change our own genetic makeup. In practice there are definitely scenarios that you and I wouldn&amp;#039;t desire. But in principle it doesn&amp;#039;t have to be scary. I believe that if this knowledge is the direction that evolution is going to take us, then we should embrace it, perhaps even harness it. We shouldn&amp;#039;t reject this possibility simply because it makes us uncomfortable. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a72/esq1205bbyounglahn-238-2/>