After my public lectures on evolution, someone in the audience invariably asks, “Are we still evolving?” People want to know if humans are getting taller, smarter, better looking or more athletic. My answer is truthful but disappointing: We’re almost certainly evolving, but we don’t know in what direction or how fast. While some studies show that natural selection is acting on traits such as age of menopause (increasing), age at which first child is produced and blood cholesterol (both decreasing), this is hardly the stuff that excites futurists. And, regardless, there’s a critical difference here: Selection isn’t the same as evolution. Even if selection culls people with high cholesterol, unless those people are on average genetically different from those with lower cholesterol, we won’t see the genetic change over time that constitutes evolution. Evidence suggests that human generations are long, evolution is slow, and so all we can say is that there’s the potential for evolution.
The authors of “Evolving Ourselves” disagree. Not only, they claim, are we evolving faster than ever, but we’re doing it to ourselves. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, venture capitalists who fund biotechnology companies (Gullens was once a professor at Harvard Medical School), argue that Homo sapienshas hijacked evolution — not just in our own species but in virtually all species: “For better or worse, we are increasingly in charge. We are the primary drivers of change. We will directly and indirectly determine what lives, what dies, where, and when. We are in a different phase of evolution; the future of life is now in our hands.”
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