Evolution is a beautiful theory. It explains everything from why some birds lose the ability to fly, to the bizarre meandering path of the vagus nerve in our bodies.

There is no question that evolution makes sense of the extraordinary diversity of life on Earth, but can it actually be put to practical use?

The answer is: it can and it should. The rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs – estimated to kill 19,000 people a year in the US alone, and cost the country $80 billion annually – is an example of what happens when we don’t apply evolutionary theory.

So why is so little attention paid to understanding the evolutionary consequences of our actions?


Part of the problem is that only in the past couple of decades has it become clear just how fast evolution can produce change. Another reason is that there is no such discipline as “applied evolution”. Because it straddles such a broad range of fields, from cancer to conservation, researchers who are “applying evolution” have a hard time finding out what their colleagues are up to.

That, however, is about to change. A new journal called Evolutionary Applications has just been launched. The first issue is dedicated to making the point that applying evolution is crucial – and it makes a convincing case.

Tilted balance

Take HIV. Could the virus evolve to spread via insects such as ticks or mosquitoes, as well as by sexual contact? The virus has been shown to survive for more than 10 days in one African tick, so this horrifying prospect is certainly plausible.

At first the answer appears reassuring. At present, HIV is not spread via insects because levels of the virus are too low in the blood of infected people.

Transmission via insects could occur if virus levels were much higher, but people with such high virus levels would succumb to AIDS far more quickly, reducing the opportunity for transmission compared with existing strains that spread sexually.

Insect transmission is therefore unlikely to evolve, conclude Troy Day and colleagues at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

But there is a catch, the team points out. Strategies intended to prevent the sexual spread of HIV, such as condom use, could alter the relative benefits for the virus of sexual versus insect transmission. It is possible that the more successful we are at blocking the sexual spread of HIV, the more likely it is that a form of HIV capable of spreading via insects will evolve.

Changing behaviour

Or take at the biggest alteration we are making to the planet: increasing carbon dioxide levels faster than has ever happened naturally.

One important question is how higher carbon dioxide will change the productivity of phytoplankton in the oceans, which will partly determine how much CO 2 the oceans will soak up. Studies in which existing phytoplankton are exposed to higher CO 2 suggest their productivity will increase.

But a paper in the new journal suggests that this kind of experiment could be misleading.

Phytoplankton that have evolved in a high CO 2 environment could behave quite differently to those exposed to it for the first time, point out Graham Bell of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Sinead Collins of the University of Edinburgh, UK.

For instance, most types of phytoplankton have mechanisms for concentrating CO 2 in their cells. But Collins and Bell have found that these mechanisms degenerate in marine algae kept in high CO 2 conditions for 1000 generations.

While they stress that more research is needed, their surprising conclusion is that evolution in a high CO 2 world could result in populations of phytoplankton that are less productive than existing ones. And that means we might not be able to rely on them to soak up ever more carbon for us in the future.

Flu future

Another article looks at how the severity of the disease caused by a pathogen or parasite changes as it invades a new population. For instance, H5N1 bird flu currently kills about half the people it infects. It is widely assumed that if the virus does start spreading among humans it will become far less dangerous.

However, the models created by James Bull of the University of Texas, Austin, and Dieter Ebert of the University of Basel, Switzerland, add to the evidence that such assumptions are flawed. Viruses such as H5N1 could have devastating effects before they evolve to become less virulent, they conclude.

Power of knowledge

Evolutionary Applications contains many more examples of the importance of applied evolution (content is free during 2008). All doctors, for instance, should read the summary of why understanding and applying evolution matters in medicine, written by Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan.

Nesse says that progress is being hampered by the fact that many medics still think of the body as a machine designed by an engineer, when in fact it is a “bundle of compromises … designed to maximise reproduction, not health”.

There is no question about the importance of applied evolution. The trouble is, if biologists themselves are only just waking up to how relevant and crucial evolution can be, what hope is there of educating the leaders and policy makers who need to understand and act upon this research? Not much, I fear.

Evolution – Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.