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And it’s definitely happening. This recent paper from Britain is called “Human Capital Mediates Natural Selection in Contemporary Humans.” That’s a fancy way of saying evolution is affected by the traits of people who have children.
The paper used a sample of more than 400,000 white people in Britain, and compared the number of children they had to the traits they had — good and bad — as shown by their polygenic scores.
To the left are the traits that are being bred out, and at the bottom, being bred out most rapidly, are three measures of intelligence.
The authors of the study are blunt: Consistently over time, polygenic scores associated with lower earnings, education, and health are selected for, and higher earnings, education and better health are selected against.
In just a single generation, the genes associated with cognitive ability and higher educational attainment have become about 5% less common in Britain, while the ones associated with smoking, high BMI and high waist circumference have become more common by that same amount.