Evolution speeds up

There’s an interesting new study out on human evolution: apparently, driven by increasing population size and migration, it has speeded up in the past 50,000 years. (The New York Times coverage is here; Scientific American‘s is here.) I confess that I’m mildly curious about how surging presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and the other “God made it all in seven days” GOP candidates respond to this… if they do at all. But I’m more intrigued by the last part of the Scientific American story, which, in an oddly positivist way, suggests that our genes hold the secrets of our history.
Here’s the relevant bit:

But the history of humanity is beginning to be read out from our genes, thanks to a detailed knowledge of the thousands of them that have evolved recently. “We’re going to be classifying these by functional categories and looking for matches between genetic changes and historic and archaeological changes in diet, skeletal form, disease and many other things,” Hawks says. “We think we will be able to find some of the genetic changes that drove human population growth and migrations—the broad causes of human history.”

Is that what history is? Broad causes? Migration and population growth? I suppose that we must understand these things if we are to understand humanity’s origins and dispersion, but I am more interested in the history of human consciousness: how people thought, what they felt, how they reacted to the world and people around them. Our genes (of course) shape our ability to think, feel, and react, but the content of those thoughts, feelings, and reactions matters. These aren’t incompatible things, and the author of the piece isn’t suggesting that we ignore culture. But as we unlock more of the secrets of our genes, we are increasingly tempted to ascribe all sorts of things to genes, and to ignore the importance of human consciousness and volition.