Edwin Herrera-Paz

I am a Honduran physician who works for the Universidad Católica de Honduras, with formation in medical and forensic genetics. I have published my research on population genetics in Honduran ethnic groups, and won the Honduran National Science Contest in 2004. Presently I am also an international consultant to CAAPA, a consortium that studies asthma genetics in African ancestry populations of the Americas. The consortium, leaded by scientists at Johns Hopkins University, has performed more than 1000 complete DNA sequences from several populations throughout the American continent.

In 2002, during my formation as a medical geneticists at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, I begin to think that Darwinian's theory of evolution was not enough to explain evolution to complexity since life on earth spans all levels of complexity. Finally, two years ago I decided to publish a book with these ideas, just for my human genetics class. Now, I want to share this ideas with the general public.

Recently, CAAPA (and other studies) has found a huge amount of DNA variation, especially SNPs of low MAF. For some researchers these variations are a signature of the fast human population expansion. However, many variants are imputed as potentially deleterious. According to my ideas such variation is a manifestation of the a process of genome simplification due to the benevolent environment produced by complex human groups.

Recently I realized that my ideas are shared by some scientists around the world.