For decades the consensus view—among the public as well as the world’s preeminent biologists—has been that human evolution is over.

“natural selection has almost become irrelevant” to us, the influential Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould

a team of researchers

find an abundance of recent adaptive mutations etched in the human genome; even more shocking, these mutations seem to be piling up faster and ever faster, like an avalanche.

Over the past 10,000 years, their data show, human evolution has occurred a hundred times more quickly than in any other period in our species’ history.

Many of these DNA variants are unique to their continent of origin, with provocative implications.

It is likely that human races are evolving away from each other

Some scientists are alarmed by claims of ethnic differences in temperament and intelligence, fearing that they will inflame racial sensitivities.

Yet even skeptics now admit

some human traits,

are evolving