A team of researchers sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina, examined data taken during a 60-year study of more than 2,000 North American women.
They analyzed traits important to human health and the effects these traits had on their children over the participants’ life spans.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team says it was able to estimate the strength of those traits in natural selection, and predict how each trait might evolve in the future.
They say that the descendants of the women will be slightly shorter and heavier, have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, will have their first child at a younger age and reach menopause later in life.
“These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things,” said Stephen Sterns of Yale University. “But what that means is that humans aren't special with respect to how fast they're evolving. They're kind of average.”