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I'd definitely like to know more about that. Can you cite any sources?
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Gregory Cochran has something coming out about it. Bruce Lahn talks about it in the brain a lot, especially relevant here is the ASPM gene 6000 years ago. Also there are some indicators that brain size is changing as well (getting smaller surprisingly) but that's pretty new.
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But As long as they're not strongly being selected for, they won't survice and reproduce more than the other genes, which is what makes large evolutionary changes possible.
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Depending on population size neutral variants can hang around a long time.
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but it seems to me like maybe you making a mistake along the line.
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I'm pretty sure I'm not. Someone asked me about why I don't like the preponderance of Dawkins in the popular evolution literature and this thread gives a pretty good example why. soon2bepro seems pretty intelligent and clearly has thought about these things but it seems like Dawkins is essentially his only source on evolution so he has a biased and very narrow view about how evolution works.
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A major evolutionary change only happens after many, many generations of small steps towards it.
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But it can happen a lot faster than you think it does. Mayr's work on speciation, Eldridge and Gould's punctuated equilibrium kind of introduced this idea (although even in Darwin's writings there was some discussion of something like it), Dawkins talks about things like this (he referred to "variable speedism" - PE being one type) in The Blind Watchmaker (someone correct me if I'm citing the wrong book - it's been a while).
Why do you think that it needs to take so long for changes?
Also, I'm having trouble reconcinling some of your views. Ignoring "quick" evolutionary change for a moment, you said that evolutionary change, specifically with natural selection, takes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of years, (and I agree with you for a lot of stuff) however, then you state that humans are not being acted on by natural selection - but this view is is based on what? Forty (or less, depending on who you are talking to) thousand years? How would you know that based on such a small snip of evolutionary time.
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If completely different traits are selected for in every consecutive generation
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I'm not sure what you mean here or how it's related to my views. I'm not talking about one generation (although some sunflowers are thoguht to have speciated in a few dozen generations).
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So if any major evolutionary change is to naturally take place in such an scenario, it'll be on based on random chance alone, not natural selection.
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What are you referring to when you talk about "random chance"?
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None of these happen often enough on a large scale, nor make for a major change to be selected for.
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Whaaa?!?!? Populations of people don't move around that much? (there have been several major migrations to the US in the past 500 years or so that have drastically changed allele frequencies in the population)
There haven't been disease epi- and pandemics over the past fivehundred years that have removed large portions of the population and drastically changed allele frequencies?
Also, look at this for some ideas:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/r...5/30_aids.html
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I guess a major event like an extremely contagious, world wide, short-term mortal disease or a severe change in all of earth's natural enviroment could change the way things are going, but that's not the point.
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Isn't it?