ORIGINS

摘要

In a report published online 26 October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stearns and his colleagues documented natural selection in 2238 U.S. women. The women were subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the health of thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1984.The scientists searched for traits that were correlated with having a higher number of children. Then they checked to see whether those traits tended to be passed down from mother to child-in other words, whether they were genetically based.