Are Humans Still Evolving?

We may no longer suffer the evolutionary pressures that plagued our ancestors, but this doesn’t mean mother nature has gone into retirement...

- Dr Ian Rickard

Back in 1965, Rudolph Zallinger created an illustration for Time Life books, which has been much-imitated and satirised. The original image, called The March Of Progress, depicted a chimpanzee-like creature on the left, and ended with what can be fairly described as a healthy-looking and athletic man of European ethnicity on the right. The message from this influential image and its title was clear: human evolution is a progressive march from primal origins to the final, all-singing, all-dancing, all-Tweeting specimens that we are today. We represent the pinnacle of Mother Nature’s achievements. She can now rest, her work being at an end, with the creation of a being that has mastery over its own fate. Human evolution now appears to be over.

Except it isn’t – not by a long way. In fact, it will never be over, nor could it be. Evolution is something that is happening all the time in all populations of all species on the planet. The word ‘evolution’ simply means ‘cumulative change’, with biological evolution referring specifically to changes in allele frequencies different versions of the same gene, and their distribution changes all the time. This is because new mutations arise in the genetic code and individuals move between populations. Sometimes, the changes are simply down to chance. And when any of these happen (and they always happen), biological evolution is occurring.

ENDLESS EVOLUTION