Hawks in U.S. News

I'm featured in an article in U.S. News and World Report, by Nancy Shute. It was a great interview, and she's put together our work on recent acceleration with some questions about where human evolution is headed.

She also cites work by Simon Baron-Cohen, Gregory Wray and Nick Bostrom. It's a nice group to talk about recent and ongoing changes in human biology.

I have to say one thing about being interviewed for the story that had me rolling at the time. I was called by a fact-checker to verify my quotes -- he seemed like a really knowledgeable, broadly-read person. He was very careful to check everything thoroughly, and asked several probing questions to make sure.

That is, until he came across the idea that "more people means more mutations." "Well," he said, "that just makes sense, doesn't it?"

I laughed and laughed! I said, "Yes, you say that now, but that's exactly what we had to show!"

"Oh," he said. "You had to show that? It seems pretty simple to me."