Are we still evolving? Scientists have grappled with this question since the time of Darwin. Now, in this provocative book, biologist Christopher Wills argues that we are not only continuing to evolve but that our pace of change is accelerating. He examines the rapid, short-term evolutionary change taking place in people living at the earth's extremes (even as babies, Tibetans can draw in more oxygen than lowlanders), and the new physiology of those who participate in extreme sports. But the more we shape our environment, the more it seems to shape us: Whether the future has us wiring our...

In this remarkable account, evolutionary biologist Christopher Wills takes us on a voyage of discovery through the exotic pasts of the viruses and bacteria that periodically emerge with such disastrous results for our species. It is our knowledge of their secret lives, the eons spent quietly passing in and out of myriad other life forms, mutating and coadapting, that gives us hope of taming them. By putting these organisms--from bubonic plague to Ebola--at center-stage, Wills shows how we will eventually master them.