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Would not cloned individuals be subjected to evolution? Assuming they could reproduce.

Martin
On Jul 20, 2010, at 11:57 AM, Jennie Dusheck wrote:

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> Hi all,
> I just joined this list recently and have been lurking.  I am a science writer with a strong interest in public science education, especially evolution. I am working on a science education project related to evolution.
> 
> I don't think it's possible to stop evolution of natural populations, whether human or otherwise. Even if small populations of humans reproduced through cloning--and really why go to all that trouble?--the rest of the world would carry on as usual. As far as humans not evolving, the most you could ever see is very strong stabilizing selection, which is typical of highly specialized species--the opposite of what we are. I think geneticists will continue to find lots of signs of recent evolution in human populations. In humans, as in all organisms, evolution is a dynamic, ongoing process, not something that "happened a long time ago."
> 
> Cheers,
> Jennie Dusheck
> MA Zoology
> Science Writing & Editing
> Santa Cruz, CA
> 
> At 9:31 AM -0400 7/20/10, Beryl Rosenthal wrote:
>> Very cool!  Just as an fyi, immediately after Dolly The Sheep came to light, I heard a talk by a geneticist who suggested that human cloning could conceivably stop evolution in its tracks. HmmŠ
>> Beryl
>> 
>> On Jul 20, 2010, at 9:00 AM, martin weiss wrote:
>> 
>>> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.
>>> 
>>> "I don't think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased," says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Read more in :
>>> 
>>> New York Times, Science Times, July 20, 2010
>>> 
>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html?_r=1&ref=evolution
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> 
>>> __________________
>>> __________________
>>> Martin Weiss, PhD
>>> Science Interpretation Consultant
>>> mweiss at nyscience dot org
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
>> Beryl Rosenthal
>> Executive Director, Waterworks Museum
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__________________
__________________
Martin Weiss, PhD
Science Interpretation Consultant
mweiss at nyscience dot org

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