Owen D. Jones

Force of Nature

While plenty of books tell readers how natural selection works, Force of Nature focuses on why understanding it has enormous practical value for reader's lives, right now.Natural selection never signs its work, earns awards, or collects the praise of peers. Still, the closer we look, the more awesome it is. We may understand that as life's most powerful process it shapes all living things in their endlessly surprising and photogenic diversity. But we're nowhere near done discovering its full power, scope, and reach. While plenty of books tell readers how natural selection works, Force of Nature focuses on why understanding it has enormous practical value and is important to reader's lives, right now. With vivid examples, the book shows how looking through the lens of natural selection adds value in domains as diverse as medicine, psychology, agriculture, artificial intelligence, engineering, economics, and law. Force of Nature illustrates how deepening our understanding of natural selection can help us to reduce errors, lower costs, increase efficiencies, and improve our ability to pursue some of our existing goals. It reveals hidden patterns that natural selection paints across seemingly disconnected things, from airplanes, cancers, and cod, to body armor, robot navigation, the feeling of ownership, and how we assess risks within the daily swirl of imperfectly predictable events. For example, the book looks at why both doctors and patients so often--and indeed so wildly--misunderstand diagnostic statistics for diseases like breast cancer. It illustrates how researchers can code software to evolve itself automatically to solve seemingly intractable problems. It explores the bases for some systemic but illogical biases in human decision-making. And it connects all these examples not only to each other but also to soil probes on Mars, satellite antennas, human breastmilk, the architectures of legal systems, and more. You are sure to come away with deeper understandings of how natural selection works, influences human behaviors more broadly and deeply than commonly contemplated, and how greater understanding of it can be harnessed to aid human flourishing across a surprisingly wide swath of domains.