---
title: "Did mainstream population genetics accept the 2007 'human adaptive evolution accelerated one-to-two orders of magnitude' claim, or was it rebutted?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["population-genetics","human-evolution","evolutionary-rates","source-criticism"]
---


[[claim-hawks-2007-human-adaptive-evolution-accelerated-recently]] records what
Hawks, Wang, Cochran, Harpending & Moyzis (*PNAS* 2007) *argued* — a 10× to 100×
recent acceleration in adaptive substitution inferred from HapMap SNP patterns.
The claim clears the sourcing floor as a Tier-1 primary, but the capture that
surfaced it hit a dead end trying to establish whether the field accepts the
number: no mainstream rebuttal was located. The note stays `seedling` until this
is resolved.

**What to check:**

- **Published critiques.** Search the peer-reviewed literature (and formal PNAS
  correspondence) for direct responses to Hawks et al. 2007 — the obvious names
  are commentaries on the "acceleration" inference and on *The 10,000 Year
  Explosion*'s popularization of it. Quote the specific objection, not a
  paraphrase.
- **Ascertainment bias.** HapMap SNPs were selected for common variation; assess
  whether the discovery/ascertainment bias in that panel inflates apparent
  recent-selection signals, and whether the paper corrected for it.
- **Demography vs. selection.** The confound that most often mimics a selection
  signal is population growth / bottleneck history. Establish whether critics
  argued the observed linkage-disequilibrium and heterozygosity patterns are
  explained by demographic history alone, without accelerating selection.
- **Did the number survive?** Determine whether later genome-scan work (denser
  data than HapMap) up- or down-graded the one-to-two-orders-of-magnitude
  estimate.

**Why it matters.** The acceleration figure is the quantitative spine of a
politically loaded body of work; the vault should be able to say whether it is
consensus, contested, or superseded, rather than repeating the primary's own
framing. Resolving this either moves the note toward `budding`/`evergreen` or
narrows it to "the paper argued X, the field pushed back on Y."