By Owen D. Jones, Vanderbilt University
NASA had a big – and little – problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication capabilities and very strict limits on size and weight. The agency gave the problem to a design team adept at simulating the way natural selection engineers solutions.
Design using natural selection is based on a simple but powerful idea with broad applications across the world: When variation in replicable traits exists, and some variants succeed more than do others, those variants will tend to spread to larger and larger percentages of future populations. For instance, early gazelles that happened to be faster were harder for predators to catch, so they were – generation after generation – more likely than slower gazelles to live, reproduce and pass on their capabilities for higher speed.
The NASA team adapted that idea to work inside a computer. They first created two very rough “parent” programs for designing the antenna. They then bred them together, creating digital “offspring” that shared varying halves of each parent, mimicking sexual recombination. To mimic mutation, some coding elements were randomly switched from 0s to 1s, and vice versa. The better-performing offspring programs were kept to become the parents of the next generation, while the rest were discarded.
Repeated over many cycles, this process quickly refined the programs that produced antenna designs until a design outperformed a human-designed version – with stronger signal, greater range and lower energy use – and took less time to develop. It was built, was launched into space in 2006, and performed admirably for the planned 90-day duration of the mission.
To me, as a professor of both law and biology, that success points to a broader truth: When people harness the logic of natural selection, they can often find efficient and effective ways to solve complex problems. As I explore in my book, “Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic – And Putting It to Use,” natural selection is the most relentless efficiency-seeking force in the history of life.
Deepening understanding
Ignoring the power of natural selection can mean missing opportunities – or making things worse.
For example, consider fishing: As global demand for fish has grown, industrial fishing has become highly efficient at removing all the individuals above a certain size. Anything small enough to fit through the holes in a net survives; anything larger dies. At first that might seem sensible: Take the big fish and leave the small ones to grow.
But that strategy shifts the factors that work to change the population for generations to come.
Fish that mature at smaller sizes are more likely than larger ones to escape the nets and reproduce. Over time, the trait of maturing smaller spreads. The result is a population composed primarily of smaller adults. For instance, a 2025 study found that heavily fished Baltic Cod became 48% shorter in length from 1996 to 2019.
The consequences compound. Smaller adult females produce far fewer eggs. In Atlantic Cod, for instance, a female that is one-half as large as a 66-pound female doesn’t lay 50% of the number of eggs; she lays about 4% as many – and her eggs are smaller, reducing the energy available to boost the chances of survival.
By ignoring how selection pressures work, the fishing industry has ended up breeding its future generations primarily from smaller fish with less reproductive ability. That has shrunk not only the average size of adults but also their overall numbers – and contributed to a global overfishing crisis.
Treating cancer
Across many fields, tuning into the evolutionary results of selection offers powerful – and often underused – insight.
Medical scientists increasingly understand the dynamic by which over-using antibiotics has helped to foster the rise of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Killing off the bacteria that are easiest to kill reduces competition for the more resistant ones.
That insight has inspired a new approach to treating some cancers, called adaptive therapy.
Tumors tend to consist of cells that vary in their resistance to cancer treatments.
Traditional approaches assume that eradication of all cancer cells should be the goal. But efforts to eradicate often backfire and kill the patient too, because treatment-resistant cells survive, have newly lessened competition, and consequently thrive and expand.
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By contrast, adaptive therapy aims to keep the most dangerous cancer cells in check by preserving some of the treatment-susceptible cancer cells to compete with them. When a tumor starts to grow, doctors increase the treatment dosages. When a tumor starts to shrink, doctors dose less.
For some patients, this approach can help manage cancer over significantly longer periods, even if – and in fact precisely because – this treatment does not seek to entirely eliminate the cancer.
A world of opportunities
Other engineers are finding even more sources of untapped inspiration in the solutions natural selection has already designed.
The nose of a Japanese bullet train, for example, was redesigned based on the beak of a kingfisher, a bird natural selection enabled to dive into water with minimal splash. The result was a quieter, faster and more energy-efficient train.
The remarkably strong and tough scales of the Brazilian pirarucu, a fish that evolved among the voracious piranha, inspired new approaches to improving body-armor.
A gecko’s ability to walk upside down on glass, with toe-filament nano-features harnessing the attractive power of subatomic particles, inspired a new class of adhesives.
Beyond physical attributes
Natural selection doesn’t only operate on anatomical or physical traits. It also works on behavioral traits.
In psychology, natural selection perspectives are showing how human brains – which have been shaped by natural selection to process information in ways that influence behaviors – incorporate some forms of information more easily than identical information conveyed in a different way. For instance, people are far better at calculating the conditional probabilities of various risks when those are expressed in natural frequencies, such as “3 out of 10,” than when expressed in the modern language of statistics, such as “0.3” or “30%.” That’s because for 99% of human history, information arrived into brains mainly as whole integers – as people, things and events.
In law, this perspective is illuminating such insights as the origins of the sense of fairness in primate relatives. There is evidence that natural selection has favored the propensity of a person to notice when they are being treated inequitably, to remember who is behind it and to respond negatively both in the present and in the future.
In economics, people tend to value an item they have just acquired far above the maximum price they would have paid to acquire it. There is evidence that this tendency, known as the endowment effect, was favored by natural selection when bargains were risky in a pre-modern world, a time when giving over one item, in trade for another, might risk getting nothing at all from an untrustworthy trading partner.
But that behavioral leaning makes less sense in the context of modern economic innovations like legal rights, banks and laws, and with mechanisms to enforce bargains, such as police and litigation. This is therefore part of a larger research stream that centers on the ways that some modern problems stem from a mismatch between our evolved brains and our modern human environments, which have changed dramatically in an eye-blink of evolutionary time.
What all this means is that the logic of natural selection has enormous practical value: It can help us identify problems, inspire new solutions, and recognize when our own actions are silently undermining our goals.
Owen D. Jones, Professor of Law; Professor of Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University
Owen D. Jones has received funding from The MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Glenn M. Weaver Foundation.
Of the hundreds of The Conversation essays I've been very privileged to read, to the extent that I think I have understood them, this one strikes me as being by far the most brilliant: Thank you very, very, very much, indeed!
(Admittedly, my judgment may be influenced by my delight at finding, so far as I can discern, rightly or wrongly, the courage and conviction of an author brave enough and honest enough and smart enough to eschew that strictly scientifically (or perhaps Scientifically or scientistically?) nonteleological approach or attitude officially adopted to Evolution by orthodox followers of our orthodox Judaeo-Sauline Science - the one which insists on viewing humanity as miraculously and inexplicably separate from all the rest of Nature/Evolution, and all the rest of Nature/Evolution as being miraculously and inexplicably blinder and stupider and more random and chaotic even than us human beings.)
Fervently hoping to read more from Professor Owen Jones, and possibly even on the topic of whether there is growing evidence that we humans have evolved to the point where we are knowingly harnessing the intelligence of Evolution in more personal ways, both individually and collectively as a species, so that we seem to be poised, any day now, to make an abrupt evolutionary leap in consciousness TO Consciousness, and whether there may also be rapidly accumulating evidence that other animal life on this planet is also making various leaps in intelligence of various kinds, including of a lion-lying-down-with-the-lamb kind,
Tom.
https://www.ted.com/talks/neri_oxman_design_at_the_intersection_of_technology_and_biology
And heartfelt thanks, again!
Thank you very much to whomever sent me a like - even if it was earned by an unattributed use of Eckhart Tolle's cute term concerning our contemporary "evolution of [or was that "in?"] consciousness TO Consciousness," for which Thank you, again, Eckhart!
I worked in one feed store for more than five years before they found me out, and then in another for about a year before they did, too, supporting the hypothesis that feed store owners, like the rest of us, are more and more rapidly becoming enlightened nowadays.
During the first five, I suggested to a coworker that our race to become more enlightened, self-aware, or spiritually conscious/awake is being hastened by circumstances which force us to evolve whether we wish to or not - by pushing us out of our comfort zones.
Isn't our taking over more conscious or "mindful" or manual control of, say, our nutrition, hydration, rest, exercise, even breathing etc....and emotional reactions to people and things symptomatic of this....a bit like our growing increasingly fed up with the discomfort of wet, soiled diapers once encouraged us to potty train ourselves, I asked her?
She laughed and told of how she and her brother (Adam, funnily enough), who was a year older than her, had had a race to get out of diapers - and that she had won!
I believe I witness much more and increasingly sporting or enlightened behavior among athletes nowadays, not to.mention spectacularly "mindful" approaches to their nutritional and mental preparation for competition.
https://youtu.be/Dg0h9iZ1ZAg?is=4ABF2BnYfnD5R-FY
As we view the stratospherically mendacious behaviors of certain folks wishing to govern and exploit and abuse and torture others on this planet, I believe rapidly increasing proportions of populations are not only asking "Could THEY not be a lot nicer, more helpful, more cooperative, more inclusive?!"....but also quickly following up with:
"Couldn't AYE?!"
This all to repeat that I'd VERY, VERY much, please, love to read more reflections by Professor Owen Jones and/or others about the encouraging and inspiring and evolving evidence that Evolution is in these very days prompting all of humanity to burst into bloom like a field of fresh sunflowers, more and more acutely aware and cognizant of and inspired and enlightened by all those earlier bloomers whom until now we do failed to comprehend - folks like Rumi and Meister Eckhart, Buddha and Lao Tzu, Confucius and Seneca and Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth and Marcus Aurelius and Vibia Petua and the Christian virgin martyrs and "All-shall-be-well-and-all-shall-be-well-and-all-manner-of-things-shall-be-well"-"Julian" of Norwich and Francis and Clare of Assisi and Teresa of Avila and Hilda of Bingen and Joan of Arc and and and and JFK and MLK and Thich Nhat Hanh...and so many more that we have and have not heard of...and Wade Watts and Bill Hicks and Robin Williams and Eckhart Tolle and all of us.
Anyways, thanks again for such a truly superb essay - and for that single like (which is maybe more than infinitely nicer than none!?)!
Tom.