John Hawks

John Hawks

Home
Speaking
Books
Archive
About

natural selection

Lactase and the Neandertals
New research shows that a common gene variant that may explain some lactase persistence in East Asia is introgressed from Neandertals.
 • 
John Hawks
Tracing the signature of African-to-Neandertal gene flow
A new study of African genetic variation yields a more accurate picture of the genetic exchanges between ancient Africans and Neandertals 250,000 years…
 • 
John Hawks
Did two pulses of evolution supercharge human cognition?
An intriguing new study tries to tabulate the ages of genetic variants associated with human phenotypes, but its claims about recent brain evolution may…
 • 
John Hawks
What color were Neandertals?
Even with whole genomes, scientists can't say very precisely what pattern of skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was in ancient populations like the…
 • 
John Hawks
Explaining the X chromosome hole in Neandertal ancestry
Natural selection reduced the variation on human X chromosomes in populations with the most Neandertal and Denisovan mixture. It may have been meiotic…
 • 
John Hawks
How much of human evolution was due to polygenic adaptation?
Selection on most human traits is likely to result in small shifts in frequency on many different genetic loci.
 • 
John Hawks
Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I look into arguments by the geneticist Steve Jones that human evolution has stopped. It hasn't.
 • 
John Hawks
Our new paper on why human evolution accelerated
I run through our 2007 work on evidence for recent natural selection across the human genome.
 • 
John Hawks
© 2025 John Hawks
Substack
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture