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"At the moment we are in an evolutionary interval. We are in between two storms. One storm has more or less blown itself out, the storm of farming.
"The question is whether we are going to stay in the calms or whether another great storm will start. And if there is one, I would say it is most certainly to do with epidemic disease."
-- Professor Steve Jones of University College London, as quoted in an article about human evolution by Anna-Marie Lever, BBC News
A little more context, in case the original article goes away or becomes subscription only at some point in the future: the article is about claims that human evolution is speeding up, based on evidence of certain common DNA segments having arisen recently, and the quote is from someone dissenting from one of the arguments made by the authors of the study the article is about. The preceeding section of the article is:
However, geneticist Professor Steve Jones of University College London said suggesting a large population size could increase the speed of evolution was "a contentious issue".
"Once a population gets above a very small size it is not very clear if its ability to respond to natural selection depends on size," he told BBC News.
"The general picture that evolution has speeded up in the last 10,000 years as we change from, to put it bluntly, being animals to being humans is clearly true," he explained. "To suggest it is happening at this instant, I would suggest, is probably wrong."
He said natural selection needed difference - either in the ability to stay alive or in the number of offspring born.
"The fundamental observation is that this difference has gone," said Professor Jones.
"At the moment we are in an evolutionary interval. We are in between two storms. One storm has more or less blown itself out [...]