polygenic adaptation
Mathieson I 2020 Human adaptation over the past 40,000 years. Curr Opin Genet Dev 62:97-104.
- despite strong evidence of the polygenicity of most human traits, evidence for polygenic selection is weak
- its importance in recent human evolution remains unclear
- the GWAS on which previous analyses had relied had not fully corrected for the effect of population stratification, leading to overestimation of the effect of selection
- how can we trust evidence for other traits, which surely suffer from similar problems?
- in 2020, the question of the contribution of polygenic adaptation to human evolution is largely back to where it was in 2010
- given that we expect polygenic selection to be common, why is it so hard to find?
- widespread pleiotropy might mean that adaptation is driven by shifts in the frequency of a relatively small proportion of loci
- adaptation on polygenic traits my be more oligogenic than polygenic
