ABSTRACT
Intelligence? ....................................................................... 132 8.4 Studying Human Natural Selection at a Molecular Level .......................... 132
8.4.1 The “Neutralist-Selectionist” Debate .............................................. 132 8.4.2 Approaches for Detecting Evidence of Selection ............................ 134
8.4.2.1 Using Protein Sequences to Test for Selection between Species ................................................................................ 134
8.4.2.2 Exploring Signatures of Selection across the Genome ...... 134
The availability of large-scale catalogs of human genetic variation has stimulated many genome-wide scans for positive selection in human populations. Evidence for population-specific selective sweeps has now been found in many regions of the human genome, in genes known to be associated with diet, disease, and social development. However, detecting evidence of molecular selection may often be confounded by the influence of the underlying complex demographics of a population; the varying mutation and recombination rates in different populations; or the ascertainment schemes used to discover polymorphisms. Here, approaches to the analysis of selection in human populations are reviewed in the context of the available data, tools, and some of the key challenges to the interpretation of putative signals of selection in human populations.
