Tag: geneticist

Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, has set off a bit of a brush fire by suggesting that human beings in technologically-advanced societies have stopped evolving, no longer faced with the challenges to their survival that made survival of the fittest so important to Darwin.

"In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of 20. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to 21," he said in a lecture in London. He elaborates on it in a piece he wrote for London's Telegraph; . He argues that we have benefited from modern medicine, agriculture, indoor plumbing, etc., making the notion of adapt-or-die less important than it used to be.