GENES, PHYSIOLOGY, AND FERTILITY
Understanding the Tibetan pattern of adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia will significantly advance our ability to address a central question in biological (physical) anthropology:
How do evolutionary processes result in populations that are well adapted to their environments?
High resolution insights into this case of ongoing natural selection will lead to building empirical models of the processes and mechanisms of natural selection in human populations where environmental, cultural, and biological factors must all be considered. This research also provides a strategy for testing the fertility consequences of other genes hypothesized to be under selection.