The 3.5 billion-year-old R&D lab right in front of us

Below, Owen Jones shares five key insights from his new book, Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic―and Putting. It to Use. Jones is a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses, in part, on the implications of natural selection for everything from medicine to law to the way we make decisions. What’s the big idea? We are prone to make big, extremely consequential mistakes and miss important opportunities to improve the human condition anytime we overlook, underestimate, or misunderstand natural selection. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Jones himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. Evolution is our present and our future—not just our past. A few years ago, a woman from Nevada arrived at a hospital with what should have been a treatable infection. Her doctors reached for the first antibiotic. It didn’t work. Nor did the second. By the end, they had tried every one of the 26 antibiotics available in the United States. When none of them worked, the patient died—just as she would have in the days before antibiotic drugs even existed. The bacteria that killed her weren’t exotic. They weren’t engineered in a lab. They had simply done what populations of organisms do every single day, all around us, and mostly without our noticing. They had evolved in reaction to selection pressures. The cost of misunderstanding how selection pressures work is far higher than most people realize. Most of us learned about natural selection in high school biology class. We learned that when you have heritable traits, variation in those traits, and differential reproductive success, you have the ingredients necessary for natural selection as a process to yield evolution as a result. In other words, traits that work will spread through subsequent populations until they become typical of the species. We learned in school that natural selection explains the relationship between species in the way plate tectoni