The nervous system—in particular, the brain and its cognitive abilities—is among humans'
most distinctive and impressive attributes. How the nervous system has changed in the …

Positive natural selection is the force that drives the increase in prevalence of advantageous
traits, and it has played a central role in our development as a species. Until recently, the …

Genome data have revealed great variation in the numbers of genes in different organisms,
which indicates that there is a fundamental process of genome evolution: the origin of new …

Archaeology's main contribution to the debate over the origins of modern humans has been
investigating where and when modern human behavior is first recognized in the …

Human Evolutionary Genetics is a groundbreaking text which for the first time brings
together molecular genetics and genomics to the study of the origins and movements of …

Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in
language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our …

It has been proposed that two amino acid substitutions in the transcription factor FOXP2
have been positively selected during human evolution due to effects on aspects of speech …

Rare mutations of the FOXP2 transcription factor gene cause a monogenic syndrome
characterized by impaired speech development and linguistic deficits. Recent genomic …

That speech and language are innate capacities of the human brain has long been widely
accepted, but only recently has an entry point into the genetic basis of these remarkable …

Given that natural selection is so powerful at optimizing complex adaptations, why does it
seem unable to eliminate genes (susceptibility alleles) that predispose to common, harmful …