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A recent survey of the DNA of over 100,000 of the Earth’s animal species, including modern humans, has yielded a shocking result: 90 percent of all extant species arose at the same time, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, upending the assumption that most creatures would have reached their modern forms at different point throughout the planet’s history. The survey also found that genetic diversity between different species doesn’t increase over time–meaning modern humans haven’t diverged genetically over the course of our history from other species at all.
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Other than skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men. The American Cancer Society’s estimates for prostate cancer in the United States are that almost 240,000 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed this year, and almost 30,000 of these men will die. About 1 man in 6 will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime–would you like to know your genetic risk for getting it ahead of time?
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At least our genes are. The Nature website reports that establishing the age of each mutation in contemporary human populations is important to fully understand our evolutionary history and will help to us to develop new medicines for diseases caused by genes.

Many of these mutations have only recently arisen–approximately 73% of all of them (and 86% of the ones that cause disease) have arisen in the past 5,000-10,000 years, which sounds like a long time, but is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
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