Whenever science news hits the mainstream media, it has the potential to become distorted into sound bites that either become alarming, as in eat a hamburger every day and get cancer. Or they bend at the optimist credulity factor as in drink a glass of red wine every day and prevent cancer. Sometimes the science reports conflict, chocolate is good/bad for you. And then there’s some like this LA Times article that headlines:

Study finds humans still evolving, and quickly

The pace has been increasing since people started spreading through Europe, Asia and Africa 40,000 years ago.

Deep within the article, we find the following nuggets of science:

“If there were not a mismatch between the population and the environment, there wouldn’t be any selection,” Hawks said. “Dietary changes, disease changes — those create circumstances where selection can happen.”

One of the most famous examples is the spread of a gene that allows adults to digest milk.

and the next one:

“Nobody 10,000 years ago had blue eyes,” Hawks said. “Why is it that blue-eyed people had a 5% advantage in reproducing compared to non-blue-eyed people? I have no idea.”

Which leads me to conclude that since I am not lactose intolerant, enjoy ice cream and have blue eyes, I am living proof of the evolved humanoid. Unfortunately there are quite a few lab chimps who out perform me in most hunter-gatherer type skills, so overall I may represent a dead end adaptation.