According to the October 22, 2009 ScienceNOW Daily News (Science Magazine) article “We're Still Evolving--And We May Be Shrinking,” a study headed by U.S. evolutionary biologist Stephen Sterns, from Yale University, studied a group of women from Framingham, Massachusetts.

The study concluded that these women are “… evolving at the same rate as the average animal and plant, and will become shorter and heavier over successive generations.”

The research team used data from the Framingham Heart Study, which uses about 5,000 residents, both male and female, from Framingham, Massachusetts.

The Framingham study has been conducted since 1948, so has seen data collected from over three generations of families.

The researchers took into account such factors as smoking and education in order to eliminate extraneous factors within the women.

Thus, they found that over ten generations in the future these characteristics of women will increase/decrease by a certain percentage.

Page two lists the three conclusions of the Sterns-led study.

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The research team, headed by Dr. Sterns, reported on such characteristics as weight, height, cholesterol, childbirth, and menopause of these women.

The conclusions are:

•    Weight and onset of menopause will increase by about 1%

•    Height and age at first childbirth will decrease by about 1%

•    Cholesterol levels will decrease by about 4%

The conclusions of the study will be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The ScienceNOW article states, “These slow rates of evolution are on par with what evolutionary biologists see in other species' traits.”

Dr. Stearns comments, "The take home message from this is that the women of Framingham are pretty average--they're just like the other plants and animals other evolutionary biologists have studied.” [ScienceNOW]

The researchers also stated that their data only applies to women of northern European descent. They will be performing further research to determine if these conclusions hold, in general, for all women.