Hawks, Wang, Cochran, Harpending & Moyzis (PNAS 2007) argued human adaptive evolution accelerated one-to-two orders of magnitude in the last 40,000 years

"Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution" (John Hawks, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran, Henry C. Harpending & Robert K. Moyzis, PNAS 104:52, 2007) used roughly 3.9 million HapMap SNPs to argue that a constant historical rate of adaptive substitution cannot account for the observed genome-wide patterns of heterozygosity, recombination, and linkage-disequilibrium block structure. The data, the authors held, fit an accelerating model instead: "the recent rate must be one to two orders of magnitude higher than the long-term rate to explain the genomewide pattern," with selection having "accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years." They attributed the surge largely to the population growth that followed agriculture, which supplies more mutations for selection to act on.

The claim sits deliberately against the vault's orthodox evolutionary-rate cluster. Where Mayr's peripatric model and its paleontological descendant treat adaptive change as concentrated in small founder populations — claim-punctuated-equilibrium-derives-from-mayr-peripatric-speciation, claim-mayr-1954-predicted-fossil-record-gaps-from-peripatric-speciation, claim-punctuated-equilibriums-novel-addition-was-stasis-emphasis — this paper runs the opposite way: large, growing populations accelerating adaptation. It is a claim about evolutionary tempo, and it is the interpretive, contested end of its lead author's range. The same Henry C. Harpending co-authored the field-standard Osteological Paradox paper and later became a documented race-science figure.

The note records what the paper argued, not that its headline multiplier is correct. Known confounds — HapMap ascertainment bias, and demographic history that can mimic selection signals — were not resolved in the capture, and no mainstream population-genetics rebuttal was located; that verification is routed to question-verify-harpending-2007-acceleration-field-acceptance, and the note stays seedling until it is closed.

Cross-domain bridge (2026-07-11 hop): the "population growth → more mutations → faster adaptation" mechanism here is structurally the same as Kremer's (1993) "more people → more ideas → faster technological change," and the AI cost collapse in claim-inference-cost-collapsed-280x is a distant instance of the same scale-driven-improvement family. All three domains also hit the same diminishing return (clonal interference / falling research productivity / power-law scaling). See 2026-07-11-hop-population-scale-diminishing-returns.