The buggy straddles a plot and collects measurements of plant temperature, stress, chemistry, color, size and shape, as well as measures of senescence. The Blimp is designed to image all the plants in an entire field from a height of 30—80 m using both infrared and digital color cameras. The workshop that led to this report was funded by the National Science Foundation. We thank the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists for organizational and planning assistance.
Many thanks to Melissa Woolley for invaluable assistance with logistics and manuscript preparation and to M. Bell, J. Borewitz, D. Jablonski, P. Parks, K. Roy, S. Smith, J. Trimble, and A. Weirman for help procuring images. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. PLoS Biol. Published online Jan 8. Jonathan B. Arnold , 2 Gill Bejerano , 3 E.
Hoekstra , 1 , 6 David P. Allen Orr , 11 Dmitri A. Petrov , 12 Susanne S. Renner , 13 Robert E. Ricklefs , 14 Pamela S. Soltis , 15 and Thomas L. Turner Stevan J. Brodie, III. Hopi E. David P. Allen Orr.
Dmitri A. Susanne S. Robert E. Pamela S. Thomas L. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Associated Data Supplementary Materials Figure S1: An example of the enormous phylogenetic trees that soon will represent the norm in phylogenetic analyses.
Figure S2: The Phenomobile, a remote sensing field buggy, and the Blimp, for remotely imaging an entire field. Text S1: Training to sustain evolutionary biology. Text S2: Infrastructure needs and opportunities in evolutionary biology. Introduction We live in an exciting time for biology. Open in a separate window. Figure 1. Evolutionary biology is being transformed by increasing access to burgeoning data on variation in genomes, organisms, and the environment.
Feeding the Human Population Feeding the rapidly growing human population, especially with increasing stress on agricultural systems from climate change, continues to be a major challenge. Sustaining Biological Diversity Evolutionary approaches have often been applied to the conservation of species and ecosystems [13] , [39] — [42].
Computation and Design Models of mutation, inheritance, and selection have inspired the development of computational evolutionary algorithms that are used to solve complex problems in many fields [53] , [54].
Evolution and Justice Genealogical relationships bear on many court cases. Emerging Research and Future Challenges in Evolutionary Biology Divining the direction of future scientific research is always fraught with difficulty. New Theory The flood of data in all areas of evolutionary biology poses important theoretical challenges: new kinds of theory are sometimes required to make sense of new kinds of data.
The Explosion and Diversity of Data DNA sequencing can now generate whole-genome data not only for single representatives of a few species but for multiple individuals from multiple conspecific populations and even from entire communities.
Figure 2. Natural history museum collections are tremendous repositories of specimens and data of many sorts, including phenotypes, tissue samples, vocal recordings, geographic distributions, parasites, and diet.
Evolutionary Processes That Shape Genomic and Phenotypic Variation The availability of genomic data from a remarkable range of species has allowed the alignment and comparison of whole genomes. Earth—Biosphere Interactions Over Vast Stretches of Time and Space We are in the midst of a massive perturbation of natural communities as species respond to human-driven changes in climate and land cover.
Understanding Biological Diversification A major and urgent challenge is to improve knowledge of the identity and distribution of species globally. Figure 3. Developing genetic and evolutionary tools for taxa with an extensive fossil record will be an important means of integrating the study of evolutionary pattern and process.
Logistical Issues and Opportunities To take full advantage of technological advances, especially the availability of new data types and databases, we must confront several challenges that involve community resources and how we use them. Glossary Cyberinfrastructure —The research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization, and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution.
Evolutionary genetics —Population and quantitative genetics. Supporting Information Figure S1 An example of the enormous phylogenetic trees that soon will represent the norm in phylogenetic analyses. TIF Click here for additional data file. Figure S2 The Phenomobile, a remote sensing field buggy, and the Blimp, for remotely imaging an entire field. Text S1 Training to sustain evolutionary biology. DOCX Click here for additional data file. Text S2 Infrastructure needs and opportunities in evolutionary biology.
Acknowledgments The workshop that led to this report was funded by the National Science Foundation. Funding Statement The workshop that led to this report was funded by the National Science Foundation. References 1. Wilson EO The future of life. New York: Alfred A. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Ecosystems and human well-being: synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Mindell DP The evolving world: evolution in everyday life. Chivian E, Bernstein A Sustaining life: how human health depends on biodiversity.
Held LI Jr Quirks of human anatomy: an evo-devo look at the human body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hum Biol 75 : — Curr Biol 17 : — PLoS Biol 9 : e doi: Trends Cogn Sci 16 : — Oppenheimer S Out-of-Africa, the peopling of continents and islands: tracing uniparental gene trees across the map. Pagel M Wired for culture: origins of the human social mind. New York: W. Accessed May 25, Annu Rev Ecol Syst 32 : — Curr Opin Environ Sustainability 2 : 1—9. Science : — Parmesan C, Yohe G A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems.
Nature : 37— Bradshaw W, Holzapfel C Climate change—evolutionary response to rapid climate change. Nature : 52— Trends Ecol Evol 27 : 94— National Science Foundation Frontiers in population biology: report of a population biology task force. National Science Foundation Frontiers in evolutionary biology. Bioscience 60 : — National Research Council. Research at the intersection of the physical and life sciences. Evol Appl 1 : 28— Evolution 66 6 : — Blasco M Telomeres and human disease: ageing, cancer and beyond.
Nat Rev Genet 6 : — Evolution is happening all around us: in our digestive tracts, in our lawns, in woodland lots, in ponds and streams, in agricultural fields, and in hospitals. For shortlived organisms such as bacteria and insects, evolution can happen on a very short time scale. This immediacy brings evolutionary biology directly into the applied realm.
Indeed, evolutionary biology has a long history and a bright future in terms of its ability to address pressing societal needs. Evolutionary biology has already made particularly strong contributions in the following areas:. Environment and conservation. Evolutionary insights are important in both conservation and management of renewable resources. Population genetic methods are frequently used to assess the genetic structure of rare or endangered species as a means of determining appropriate conservation measures.
Studies of the genetic composition of wild relatives of crop species can be used to discover potentially useful new genes that might be transferred into cultivated species. Studies of wild plants' adaptations to polluted or degraded soils contribute to the reclamation of damaged land.
Agriculture and natural resources. The principles of plant and animal breeding strongly parallel natural evolutionary mechanisms, and there is a rich history of interplay between evolutionary biology and agricultural science.
Evolutionary insights play a clear role in understanding the ongoing evolution of various crop pathogens and insect pests, including the evolution of resistance to pest-control measures.
The methods of evolutionary genetics can be used to identify different gene pools of commercially important fish and other organisms, their migration routes, and differences in their physiology, growth, and reproduction. Finding useful natural products.
Many thousands of natural products are used in medicine, food production and processing, cosmetics, biotechnology, pest control, and industry, but millions of other potentially useful natural products have yet to be screened or even discovered.
Evolutionary principles allow a targeted search by predicting adaptations to environmental selection pressures and by identifying organisms related to those that have already yielded useful natural products. Exploration of related species also has made it possible to develop natural products from more accessible relatives of rare species in which natural products have been found, as occurred when the rare and endangered Pacific yew was found to contain a substance that led to development of a drug tamoxifen useful in treating breast cancer.
Human health and medicine. Methods and principles from evolutionary biology have contributed to understanding the links between genes and human genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
Evolutionary methods help to trace the origins and epidemiology of infectious diseases, and to analyze the evolution of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic microorganisms. Evolutionary principles are used to interpret human physiological functions and dietary needs.
Methods developed by evolutionary geneticists are playing an important role in mapping defective human genes, in genetic counseling, and in identifying genetic variants that alter risks for common systemic diseases and responses to medical treatments.
The interplay between biotechnology and evolutionary biology holds great promise for application to important societal needs. As genetic engineering has reached the field implementation stage, evolutionary biologists have been prominently involved in risk assessment as well as interpretation of phenotypic consequences of trans-gene insertion. Finally, the automation of DNA sequencing has made it possible to reconstruct the precise genealogical relationship among specific genes, such as those of the human immunodeficiency virus HIV.
Understanding humanity. Evolutionary biology has contributed greatly to human understanding of ourselves by describing our origins, our relationships to other living things, and the history and significance of variation within and among different groups of people. Evolutionary anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists have advanced hypotheses on the biological bases of human culture and behavior.
In addition, the evolutionary framework for understanding humanity has had a profound impact on literature, the arts, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities. Recent studies of many different types of animals suggest that much of animal diversity has evolved by changes in a common set of regulatory genes.
The organization of such regulatory genes has been studied in detail in model organisms, such as fruit flies, and parallel genetic effects have been identified in a wide range of organisms. Advances in molecular, morphological, and computational approaches have enabled the emergence of a comprehensive framework for the evolutionary history of all life on earth.
The Tree of Life project provides a unified network for systematic investigation on all levels. Studies of variation in modern populations, recent analysis of DNA extracted from fossil remnants, and an ever more complete fossil record have provided deeper insight into the evolutionary emergence of modern humans and their culture.
Evolutionary biology has far-reaching scientific impact. Among their accomplishments in studying the history and processes of evolution, evolutionary biologists have:. Evolution is central to biological understanding.
Biologists in diverse fields regard at least a portion of what they do as evolutionary. Recent accomplishments to which evolutionary biology has contributed include the following:.
Molecular biology. Evolutionary approaches have contributed insight into the function and structure of molecular processes within cells. Examples include reconstruction and functional analysis of ancestral protein sequences, and elucidation of the significance of different types of DNA.
Evolutionary research thus points the way to research on fundamental molecular mechanisms. Developmental biology. A resurgence in interaction between developmental biology and evolutionary biology is now under way, in part through comparisons among families of genes that play critical roles in development. For example, the same genes in organisms as different as insects and mammals play surprisingly similar developmental roles in some instances, and different roles in other cases.
Such studies help to identify the developmental functions of genes and lead to a deeper understanding of the processes that transform a fertilized egg into a complex adult. Physiology and anatomy. Evolutionary biology has long influenced the study of physiology and anatomy in animals and plants, and has the potential to make many other contributions that only now are being developed.
Some of these contributions will affect the study of human physiology, including related areas such as clinical psychology. The logical perspectives, methods, and comparative data of evolutionary biology can advance our understanding of functional anatomy and physiological mechanisms, and can be applied to areas such as medicine, agriculture, and veterinary science.
Neurobiology and behavior. From its inception, the field of animal behavior has had a strong evolutionary base, for its goals have included understanding the evolutionary origin of behavioral traits and their adaptiveness. The evolutionary study of animal behavior has joined with comparative psychology in several areas of research, such as the study of learning and the search for adaptive mechanisms in human cognitive processes.
Applications beyond biology. There have long been rewarding interactions between evolutionary biology and other analytical fields, notably statistics and economics. Some of the basic tools in statistics, including analysis of variance and path analysis, were originally developed by evolutionary biologists. Along the same lines, evolutionary algorithms that mimic natural selection in biological systems are currently being used in computer and systems applications.
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Evolution and Today's Society. Meagher Thomas R. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Cite Cite Thomas R. Select Format Select format.
Permissions Icon Permissions. Open in new tab Download slide. Art credits for Evolution, Science, and Society. Issue Section:. But it is doing so e.
The fact that old frameworks are so often applicable to novel data follows directly from their high levels of abstraction. Evolutionary conflicts can arise when interacting biological agents are of different types i. Conflicts are of special interest for three prosaic reasons: they are more likely than mutualisms to lead to ongoing evolution; they play an important role in disease Stearns and Koella ; and the widespread assumption of shared interests has led to several scientific errors Williams I am bracketing several debates here, whose importance for scientific practice can be exaggerated.
In short, functional ascription can be indeterminate and change over time, while the presence of a trait can be explained in several different ways, all of which will be incomplete see, e. For some purposes, it may be possible to avoid intentional language altogether Godfrey-Smith , but it is both useful, and necessary if we want to explain why organisms look as if they were designed since apparent design implies imaginary agency.
This is difficult to take seriously; the research involves imaginary agents. Such properties of the genetic system can all evolve under the action of natural selection, but are not easily studied with optimization-based approaches e. Grafen Indeed, this is the area of evolutionary biology where unsupported claims about adaptive function are most common Lynch , Ch.
The failure of understanding is clearest in claims that the research programme is empty: that by manipulating the Price equation a mathematical identity , and relegating factors to the transmission term, researchers make claims that are unfalsifiable Pigliucci ; Cummins and Roth ; Allen et al.
This echoes the old criticism that natural selection is a tautology Maynard Smith , and takes no account of how predictive theories of adaptation are actually used. My account of this debate is simplified, and I ignore criticisms that do not put the opposing case at its strongest.
For example, Allen et al. This relates to a more serious question: whether standard accounts of adaptive function undermine all realist theories of value Street Realist theories have been defended by appealing to niche construction Rouse , or to group selection Okrent , or to something as yet unknown to science Nagel Waddington, also concerned with this issue , pp. There is ambiguity even in the most serious and substantial arguments.
This is, at least in effect, a request to shift emphasis away from the study of adaptive function, and towards more detailed dynamical descriptions of particular lineages see also Laland et al. None of this would have mattered to Waddington , who had non-scientific reasons for elevating the beaver to codirector, and focusing on cybernetic feedbacks Chs.
For a remarkable, but atypical attempt, see The Editors The fact that the laundry list items play little role in theories of adaptive function is another way of saying that they cannot explain apparent design. This may explain why so many appear in natural theology e. Bateson ; Bowler , e. Article Google Scholar. Anonymous The Namier View of History.
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