Are We Still Evolving?
Ever since Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, scientists have wondered whether the process still applies to humans. At some point, did we stop evolving?
Olly Bootle explains the current scientific view of evolution by natural selection when a vast majority of babies born in industrialized countries live to an age suitable for reproduction: “Scientists suspected that by adapting to environmental change—the driver of natural selection—using our ingenuity, we might have stopped ourselves evolving. The late Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most respected of evolutionary biologists, once said: ‘There has been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilisation we’ve built with the same body and brain.’ It turns out that he, and many others, were wrong.”
