Homo sapiens under neutral evolution

Abstract

People often would like to think themselves as special existence. In studies on organismal evolution, unexpectedly many researchers believe in contribution of positive selection for evolution of characters which made us human. However, most of evolution at genomic level is neutral process, and this is also true for evolution at protein level. There is no exception in evolution toward human lineage. I would like to show various examples on this point, including studies of my group, and would like to confirmnatural phenomenon that most of evolution which produced Homo sapiens was neutral. It should also be noted that majority of this paper is from "Introduction to Evolutionary Genomics" written by Saitou (Saitou N. Berlin: Springer; 2014).