Evolutionary Biology

Evolutionary Biology for the 21st Century

• Jonathan B. Losos mail,
 
• Stevan J. Arnold,
 
• Gill Bejerano,
 
• E. D. Brodie III,
 
• David Hibbett,
 
• Hopi E. Hoekstra,
 
• David P. Mindell,
 
• Antónia Monteiro,
• Craig Moritz,
 
• H. Allen Orr,
 
• Dmitri A. Petrov,
 
• Susanne S. Renner,
 
• Robert E. Ricklefs,
•  [ ... ],
 
• Thomas L. Turner

• Introduction

  We live in an exciting time for biology. Technological advances have made data collection easier and cheaper than we could ever have imagined just 10 years ago. We can now synthesize and analyze large data sets containing genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and multivariate phenotypes. At the same time, society's need for the results of biological research has never been greater. Solutions to many of the world's most pressing problems—feeding a global population, coping with climate change, preserving ecosystems and biodiversity, curing and preventing genetically based diseases—will rely heavily on biologists, collaborating across disciplines.
  Theodosius Dobzhansky famously proclaimed that “nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution." Though Dobzhansky's statement is sometimes dismissed by biologists in other fields as self-promotion, recent advances in many areas of biology have shown it to be prophetic. For example, genomics, which emerged mostly from molecular biology, is now steeped in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary theory helps to explain our origins, our history, and how we function as organisms and interact with other life forms, all of which are crucial to understanding our future (e.g., [1]–[5]). Evolutionary approaches have helped reconstruct the history of human culture, including, for example, the history of human populations and languages [6]–[11]. And the impact of evolutionary biology is extending further and further into biomedical research and nonbiological fields such as engineering, computer sciences, and even the criminal justice system./.../