Jonathan Weiner

Whether or not we choose to watch, evolution is shaping us all.

The rapid accumulation of change is not always progress, and forward motion is not always an advance.

What we don’t understand on either front is that the more pressure we put on our pests, the more we cause them to evolve around the pressure. The pressure is evolutionary pressure; what we fail to understand is evolution itself.

Taken together, these new studies suggest that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.

The pamphlet teaches the skills that skills that Benzer’s former labmates would now need to learn, including propaganda, “that branch of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”

Why are there so many kinds of animals? Adaptive radiations like Darwin’s finches are the essence of the answer.