Investigating the case of human nose shape and climate adaptation
The case of human nose shape & climate adaptation
http://journals.PLoS.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006616 Comparing its Qst-Fst statistic w/ that for height & skin color
QT:{{”
“To address the question of whether local adaptation to climate is responsible for nose shape divergence across populations, we use Qst–Fst comparisons to show that nares width and alar base width are more differentiated across populations than expected under genetic drift alone. To test whether this differentiation is due to climate adaptation, we compared the spatial distribution of these variables with the global distribution of temperature, absolute humidity, and relative humidity. We find that width of the nares is correlated with temperature and absolute humidity, but not with relative humidity. We conclude that some aspects of nose shape may indeed have been driven by local adaptation to climate. However, we think that this is a simplified explanation of a very complex evolutionary history, which possibly also involved other non-neutral forces such as sexual selection.”
“}}