After my pubic lectures on evolution, someone in the audience 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. We’ve seen some evolution in our species over the past few millennia, but it was detected by reconstructing history from DNA sequences. For example, we know that during the past 10,000 years, several populations of humans — those keeping sheep, cows or goats for milk gained the ability to digest dairy products. This trait was useless in our earlier ancestors who, after babyhood, never encountered milk. And in the past 3,000 years, Tibetans have acquired genetic adaptations that allowed them to develop well in their high-altitude, low-oxygen home. But these well-documented changes are limited to particular populations, so the evidence for recent evolution of our entire species, remains not much. 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 argue that humans have controlled evolution — not just in our own species but virtually in 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.” According to the authors, we’ve replaced natural selection with what they call “unnatural selection.” Overfishing, for example, has reduced the average size of many fish species, for taking the biggest fish selects in favor of those that reproduce when younger and smaller. Yet while there’s no doubt that we’re changing the planet, the claim that we're completely changing evolution on the planet does not follow. Let’s take those fish that are evolving to reproduce smaller and younger. This phenomenon has been documented in many species that we eat, but this is just a minuscule fraction of the 30,000 known species of fish. The authors speak with unwarranted assurance about how our species is evolving in response to nearly everything. When they assert, for example, our ingestion of drugs and exposure to chemicals mean that “our children’s brains are evolving fast,” they are overplaying their hand and abusing the word “evolution.” Our children’s brains may be changing fast in response to the new pharmacological environment, but change alone is not evolution.