FORCE OF NATURE

A lively investigation of the relevance of natural selection today.

Jones, a professor of law and of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, dredges up a concept most readers probably haven’t thought much about since high school and demonstrates with enthusiasm and flair why it matters to our daily lives. He makes a convincing case that we ought to consciously work with rather than disregard natural selection—“the only evolutionary process that can cause consistent, directional, and beneficial changes in widespread features of a species”—when making decisions about, for example, fishing and genetic engineering of crops, and he provides multiple examples of how doing so could benefit us. He ventures outward from conventional biology to consider how the development of artificial intelligence has benefited from the copying the processes of natural selection, applying them to computer rather than cellular codes. His discussions of the way close observation of the effects of natural selection on various animals can inspire human engineering are particularly tantalizing. Noting that “natural selection has served us many millions of free ideas,” he offers examples of “bio-inspired engineering” including bullet trains that make use of the beak design of kingfishers and dry adhesives that mimic the function of gecko feet. He also argues that natural selection applies not just to the physical features of organisms, but also to their behavior, and from there, he goes on to consider the application of natural selection to decision-making and law. While he sometimes drops deeper into an intellectual rabbit hole that not many readers will be willing to follow—particularly when he presents long summaries of the application of Bayesian statistics to calculating risks and his own research into the endowment effect or status quo bias—his obvious excitement about the subject goes a long way toward inspiring equal interest in the reader.

A wide-ranging exploration of a frequently ignored phenomenon.