Force of Nature: The Hidden Patterns in Life's Most Powerful Process

Summary

In Force of Nature, Professor of Law and of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University Owen D. Jones argues that even those who believe in evolution make two very basic, high-consequence mistakes when it comes to understanding natural selection.

First, they place emphasis on the results of evolution over the processes by which it takes place. This frames evolution as just fact or falsehood—as if what is at stake is simply the superior account. In this view, evolution is a theory that explains the relationships between species, in the same way that plate tectonics explains the relationships between continents. When evolution is framed as an historical matter, it can be ignored on a day-to-day basis.

Second, even those who do attend to evolutionary processes misunderstand how they actually work. Here, there are many ways to go wrong. And they really matter to the choices we make as a society. For instance, some people assume that encountering a new environmental impediment (such as pollution) sparks the genetic changes necessary for a species to meet that challenge. Some people assume that infectious diseases (including Covid-19) will always evolve to benignity. And others think natural selection only affects physical structures—as if evolution merely sculpts the forms of species, distributing long necks, sharp fangs, and opposable thumbs—without meaningfully influencing species-typical behavior as well.

Force of Nature provides a clear, compelling, and step-wise argument for the enormous practical value of gaining deeper familiarity with natural selection so that it can be harnessed to aid human flourishing in a surprisingly wide set of domains.