Apr 15th 2026|3 min read
HUMANS HAVE never been immune from the pressures of natural selection. Throughout the history of the species circumstances have arisen to give individuals with certain beneficial mutations an advantage over their peers, allowing their valuable genetic variants to spread among a population. Still, the emergence and rapid spread of such variants—known as strong directional selection—was thought to have been a rare occurrence in human evolution. A new study, published in Nature on April 15th, however, reveals it has played a much more influential role.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Evolution revolutions”
From the April 18th 2026 edition
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