ARE humans still evolving? It’s a controversial and exciting question. And according to Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, the answer is a resounding “yes”. Rebelling against the received wisdom of many evolutionary biologists who insist that we have reached an evolutionary plateau, the authors argue that not only are we still evolving, but also that we are actually evolving at an accelerating rate.
Cochran and Harpending draw on the past decade of genetic data for our species, including new information about natural selection’s effects on individual genes that influence features such as metabolism, disease resistance and the colour of our…
