Science journalism and recent human evolution: Moran vs. Hawks.

Larry Moran and John Hawks have engaged in an interesting debate on their respective blogs. The disagreement revolves around an article by Kathleen McAuliffe in Discover. The article describes Hawks and colleagues’ 2007 report of substantially accelerated selection in humans following the agricultural revolution and related explosion of population size. It’s important to draw a distinction between the data and the reporting thereof, as I have tried to do previously when I complained about Hawks et al.’s descriptions of their work in popular articles. Anyway, have a look at the two posts and the original article and see what you think about this.