What, then, of the future? Sitting in the comfort of the concrete savannah, has humanity stopped evolving? To help answer that question, it is instructive to look at a paper published earlier this year by Gregory Cochran. Dr Cochran, a scientist who, in the tradition of Darwin himself, works independently of an academic institution, looked at the unusual neurological illnesses commonly suffered by Ash-kenazi Jews. Traditional wisdom has it that these diseases, which are caused by faulty genes, are a consequence of inbreeding in a small, closed population. The fact that they persist is said to show that human evolution has stopped in our ever more mollycoddled and medicalised world.
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