Despite the lack of a commercial single release, the song managed to reach number 33 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.

It was the first of the band's songs to receive a music video since "Oceans", the final single from the group's 1991 debut Ten.

"[3] When speaking about "Do the Evolution", Vedder stated, "That song is all about someone who's drunk with technology, who thinks they're the controlling living being on this planet.

"[4] Pearl Jam has stated that the novel Ishmael influenced the writing of Yield,[5] and according to the novel's writer, Daniel Quinn, this song comes the closest to expressing the ideas of the book.

And on an evolutionary level, that man has been on this planet for 3 million years, so that you have this number line that goes like this [hands wide apart].

"[12] Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly stated, "On the album's most gleeful hip shaker, "Do the Evolution", Vedder howls throwaway lyrics...while the guitars gnash and grind at the primitive melody, briefly evoking the gnarly cacophony of the Stooges' monumental Fun House.

[14] The video was produced by Joe Pearson, the president of Epoch Ink animation, and Terry Fitzgerald at TME.

Throughout the video, a pale skinned woman in a black skimpy dress (similar in appearance to the character Death from the DC comic book series, The Sandman)[original research?]

The video begins with the evolution of life, from the smallest cell to the extinction of dinosaurs and reign of Homo sapiens.

The video then cuts back and forth throughout human history, depicting man's primitive, violent nature that has remained essentially unchanged over the centuries.

Such depictions include a knight preparing for the coming slaughter during the Crusades, a ritual dance by KKK (the dance is repeated with other groups throughout the video), a rally by Nazi-esque troops (with a symbol reminiscent of the Sig Rune, itself reminiscent the flash and circle used by the British Union of Fascists, instead of a swastika), concentration camp prisoners, a book burning, carnage upon a World War I-era battlefield, a girl stepping on an anthill as she runs blissfully through a field with the image suddenly changing to that of a landmine going off (as if the mine had been buried under the anthill itself), a death row inmate nervously waiting on an electric chair, the apparent virtual-reality rape of a woman, and the bombing of a Vietnamese village by an American jet, specifically an A-4 Skyhawk, the pilot of which removes his oxygen mask to reveal a skull laughing wildly, and a scene with a crying baby representing Bloody Saturday.

[17] Other social and environmental issues such as slavery, whaling, colonialism, Manifest Destiny, uncontrolled urbanization, vivisection, pollution, genetic modification and techno-progressivism are included.

The video concludes in what seems to be future scenarios of the self-destruction of the human race, including the carpet bombing of a city of clones by futuristic aircraft, computers hijacking the human mind, and finally a nuclear explosion which leaves not only a city in ruins, but the planet damaged beyond recognition.

However, near the end of the animation, the earth is briefly seen as an ovum, suggesting a rebirth and the perpetuation of the human condition.