I get so tired of comments like this:

The Grim Reaper is taking a rest, and inherited differences in the ability to withstand cold, starvation or disease no longer power Darwin’s machine. Those who die from such killers do so when they are so old that natural selection has lost interest.

Right. Tell the folk in Darfur that. Tell those in Bangladesh after a cyclone. Tell folks in New Orleans, or Indonesia, or native populations in Nunavit, Australia, New Zealand, the Amazon, South Africa and Tierra del Fuego. Tell those whose access to health care is patchy at best. Even in the UK that is not true.

I don’t get Steve Jones. He’s notionally very well informed, but then he comes out with stupid comments like this:

And what about natural selection? That, too, is on the way out. I depress my students with the statement that two out of three of them will die for reasons connected to the genes they carry. Then I cheer them up by pointing out that in Shakespeare’s time, two out of three of them would be dead already.

And their dying earlier than their conspecifics for genetic reasons won’t affect, say, the ongoing welfare of their grandchildren? Is Jones unaware that humans are a social organism that contribute to the fitness of later generations long after reproduction stops? Is he unaware that even slight differences in fitness can have largescale effects over many generations? This is a classic piece of English genetic selectionism.

Moreover, is he unaware that the so-called selection-stopping health care of the “developed world” has been in place for less than two generations and may not survive for many more? Selection is a transgenerational process, and ephemera do not generally add much beyond a bit of statistical noise. Finally, is he unaware that if you allow all to survive to reproduction, rates of population growth will inevitably exceed the resources available to feed them, and selection, delayed but not put off indefinitely, will come thundering back with a crash even for those traits we think are “solved”.

Evolution has not stopped, nor even, I warrant, slowed appreciably. Sure, large populations tend to evolve less quickly than smaller ones for good stochastic reasons, but populations are partitioned. It may be in England that one’s partner has ancestry from a long way away, but there have been mass migrations in the human past before, in Africa when the cultural technique of animal herding spread southwards 2000 years ago, and before that in the period from around 3000-1500BCE from central Asia to Europe and back. Genes do not stay in one place for very long in evolutionary terms. Jones is mistaking small temporary effects for evolutionarily significant ones.

Actual studies on wild populations show that evolution is not a monotonous gradual process always and everywhere the same, but a process of fits and starts, diffusion and collection, and where one pressure is removed, others take its place immediately. White europeans in Australia are presently undergoing strong selection against pale skin, through large differentials in melanoma rates. In another few thousand years, we might expect even the descendants of whites to be quite dark. It happened in the Indian subcontinent and South American. It is happening here.

Once and for all: evolution has not stopped. Not now nor ever.

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