The review article below discusses the approaches used to study natural
 selection and adaptations in the human lineage. It provides a nice overview
 of the ongoing research in this (interesting) area. 
 
 Science 16 June 2006:
 Vol. 312. no. 5780, pp. 1614 - 1620
 
 Positive Natural Selection in the Human Lineage
 P. C. Sabeti, S. F. Schaffner, B. Fry, J. Lohmueller, P. Varilly, O.
 Shamovsky,
 A. Palma, T. S. Mikkelsen, D. Altshuler, E. S. Lander
 
 Positive natural selection is the force that drives the increase in
 prevalence
 of advantageous traits, and it has played a central role in our development
 as
 a species. Until recently, the study of natural selection in humans has
 largely
 been restricted to comparing individual candidate genes to theoretical
 expectations. The advent of genome-wide sequence and polymorphism data brings
 fundamental new tools to the study of natural selection. It is now possible
 to
 identify new candidates for selection and to reevaluate previous claims by
 comparison with empirical distributions of DNA sequence variation across the
 human genome and among populations. The flood of data and analytical methods,
 however, raises many new challenges. Here, we review approaches to detect
 positive natural selection, describe results from recent analyses of
 genome-wide data, and discuss the prospects and challenges ahead as we expand
 our understanding of the role of natural selection in shaping the human
 genome.
 
 Web ref:
 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5780/1614
 
 Tom Billings