What if everything that’s not a disease is polygenic?
In the early 2000s FOXP2 was dubbed the “language gene”. It was a sexy story. Humans exhibited accelerated adaptive evolution on this locus in relation to our relatives. Additionally, vocally oriented lineages such as birds and whales were also subject to the same process. But over the past five years or so I’ve heard a […]
Desperately seeking the secret of FOXP2
Since the early 2000s FOXP2 has shown up again and again in the press and scientific literature. Dubbed the “language gene” it exhibits evidence of accelerated evolution in the human lineage after it split from other apes. Additionally, a homolog of the same gene shows evidence of evolutionary change distinctive to songbirds and whales. Obviously […]
FOXP2 in Nature
Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2:…It has been proposed that the amino acid composition in the human variant of FOXP2 has undergone accelerated evolution, and this two-amino-acid change occurred around the ti…