Background The recent increase in human polymorphism data, together with the availability
of genome sequences from several primate species, provides an unprecedented opportunity
to investigate how natural selection has shaped human evolution. Results We compared
human branch-specific substitutions with variation data in the current human population to
measure the impact of adaptive evolution on human protein coding genes. The use of single
nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with high derived allele frequencies (DAFs) minimized …