"The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals... These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things"

You can easily imagine evolution being faster (or slower) at other times and places.

I doubt that medicine except for antibiotics has lengthened life expectancy much. It is public health measures like clean water and sewers that have had the most benefit.

Interesting study. One concern though. (perhaps unfounded) By adjusting for education and smoking, you are adjusting for behaviors which are likely themselves influenced by genes-- and some of the same genes, in fact, that may impact height, which is one of the traits this study was following. I'm curious how this adjustment was done.

I haven't read the paper yet, but this seems to me
a study that is essentially impossible to do right
technically. They controlled for "education and smoking" but what about things like diet in infancy? In the USA we do not live or eat as we did
60 years ago.

This movie seems to be related:

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapun...tapundit/87026/

> I doubt that medicine except for antibiotics has lengthened life expectancy much.

Vaccines have probably been something like 100 times more important than antibiotics. Antibiotics have essentially zero importance in things like the industrial age population explosions - at least in the West, that is.

A certain polemical school is largely responsible for the widespread propagation of the view that better nutrition, better hygiene, and reduced crowding have been significantly more important than vaccines. And that view is highly questionable, and now rather little-believed. I discussed this in comments here. In the post proper you can see that measles was not declining prior to the vaccine coming along. This holds for a number of infections; I looked it up. The only exception I found is TB, which shows a phenomenal and steady decline during the industrial age, over many generations, prior to any vaccine or treatment.

I didn't look into cholera, which might well be another exception.

I accidentally promoted the probably-false view here on GNXP about a year ago, citing a webpage full of fabricated data while hypothesizing about the Flynn effect and infection. I had looked just at the data, not the text, and only weeks later did I notice that it was an anti-vaccine loonery page! The data, which indicated very little impact from vaccines, were nonsense - discordant with all other data I looked up from varied sources (which were concordant).

Just to be clear, the hypothesis that vaccines were a good deal less important than nutrition and hygiene is a somewhat respectable one, though, again, little-believed now. This school never denied that vaccines have had significant impact. They were not like the data fabricators now found on the web.