"Force of Nature
By Owen D. Jones
Norton, 288 pages, $31.99
On the Future of Species
By Adrian Woolfson
MIT, 480 pages, $34.95
“Evolution by natural selection is such a familiar concept that it can be easy to forget it describes the present as well as the past. In "Force of Nature," Owen Jones aims to remind us that evolution remains a dynamic, creative force from which we still have much to learn. The abrasive texture of shark skin repels barnacles and has inspired antimicrobial surface coatings for hospitals; the seeds of a flowering plant offer clues to the designers of probes destined for other worlds. He argues that, as natural selection has shaped our brains and influenced our actions, the way we guide and govern behavior should be approached with our evolutionary roots in mind.
Mr. Jones, a professor of law and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, explains how the complex and often beautiful products of evolution emerge from the simple fact of variation.
Random mutation makes individuals differ, even within a single species.
When one such difference happens to offer even a slight edge in surviving and reproducing, those who carry it tend to leave more offspring, who inherit it in turn.
Over generations, the trait propagates through the population until what was once a rare mutation becomes commonplace.
While evolution lacks "intention," the author observes, natural selection is "relentlessly, exquisitely" effective at enabling life to adapt to a range of environmental conditions.
Evolution can move with surprising speed; Mr. Jones cites the recent emergence of bacteria that digest plastic, and the rising share of female elephants in Mozambique born without tusks, as human poaching culls the tusked and leaves the rest to breed.
Failure to account for evolution can generate predictably bad consequences. Overprescribing antibiotics leads to deadly resistant bacteria, while industrial fishing, which harvests the largest adults, ultimately selects for ever-smaller fish. It is, Mr. Jones writes, "as if we are determined to create populations of runts."
Throughout "Force of Nature," Mr. Jones develops his case for evolution's contemporary relevance. As he puts it, natural selection blindly explores a vast "design space" -- the trillions of trait combinations a species might have -- turning up workable solutions that human designers have learned to borrow. The streamlined beak of the kingfisher, which enters the water almost without a splash, became the model for the nose of Japan's bullet train. We can also learn from the process itself: When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration needed an unusually efficient antenna for a small satellite, it set a computer program to mimic natural selection -- generating variants, testing them, keeping what worked -- and got back an odd shape no engineer would have thought to draw, one that ultimately flew on the satellite and did its job transmitting data well.
Evolution shapes behavior as well as structure. Mr. Jones describes a freshwater snail that, sensing a predator, instinctively climbs or descends depending on where the perceived threat tends to hunt.
A lab-raised monkey, born without a fear of snakes, can be taught to fear them -- but not to fear flowers, a difference that suggests an inherited readiness to learn a survival strategy. These proclivities can misfire when conditions change. A moth circling a porch light evolved to navigate by the moon; the bulb is an "evolutionary novelty" with which its ancestors never had to contend. Like our atavistic cravings for fat and sugar, many cognitive biases also may have made more sense in an earlier environment -- what Mr. Jones calls "time-shifted rationality."
All of this builds toward the subject Mr. Jones cares about most, the law. Legal codes, he suggests, exist to regulate behavior that evolution shaped, and so should, in his view, rest on an understanding of where that behavior comes from.
Our expectation of fairness and our disdain for cheaters, expressed in laws across human cultures, can be traced to social primates -- evidence that our sense of justice has deep evolutionary foundations.
But when Mr. Jones turns to what legislators and judges should actually do with this understanding, he stops short, taking pains to distinguish between the biology we inherit and the values we choose. A sensible reflex, but it also means the long-awaited payoff never quite materializes -- an underwhelming finish to an otherwise engaging and illuminating argument.
While Mr. Jones invites us to learn from evolution's exquisite achievements, Adrian Woolfson, a molecular geneticist and biotech entrepreneur, surveys the same handiwork in "On the Future of Species" -- his title a brazen echo of Charles Darwin's own -- and comes away disappointed. Evolution optimizes "for survival rather than elegance," he writes, and our biology shows it. We "carry the burden of approximately four billion years of accumulated mutations," a long record of "convoluted workarounds rather than . . . definitive, streamlined solutions." We have too many bones in the foot, a spine ill-suited for upright walking and neurons that are sluggish and error-prone. Evolution, he maintains, favors the adequate, and human design can do better.
Mr. Woolfson's book, which is subtitled "Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence," proposes not the gene-by-gene editing of today's most ambitious therapies but a more radical rewriting of the human genome. Engineered systems are built from standardized parts, each of which can be repaired or changed without disturbing the rest; living systems are so densely interconnected that an adjustment to any single component would likely affect many others. Mr. Woolfson would replace the "irrational tangled structure" of our DNA with something better organized and easier to modify -- a process software engineers call refactoring, the periodic cleanup that keeps a sprawling program from collapsing under its own "spaghetti code."
Like Mr. Jones, Mr. Woolfson is struck by the spectacular range of organisms that could in principle exist, of which evolution has realized only an "infinitesimally small sampling." He wants to explore the rest and sees two capabilities converging to allow us to do so. One is synthesis: Whole genomes can already be built to order for simpler organisms, leaving mostly a manufacturing challenge of scale and cost. The harder task is interpretive -- learning the rules that connect a genome to the living thing it produces. That predictive grasp is the heart of what Mr. Woolfson describes as artificial biological intelligence, the threshold at which biology would turn from a descriptive science into a predictive, engineering one.
The boldness of these aspirations is accentuated by Mr. Woolfson's candor about how far we stand from achieving any of them. We "can read the language of DNA," he grants, but "we cannot yet speak it, nor fully comprehend it."
The rules linking a sequence to a finished organism -- biology's "generative grammar" -- remain, he acknowledges, a forbidding problem that may never fully yield.
Yet, he argues, biologists have long sought to understand life by taking it apart, and we might also understand it by learning how to synthesize organisms from component parts. Construction, seen this way, is not the reward waiting at the end of knowledge but a path to achieving it.
"On the Future of Species" grounds this vision in an absorbing history, tracing the deciphering of life's chemistry -- from Friedrich Miescher, who first isolated nucleic acids in 1869, to Frederick Sanger, who learned to read DNA sequences in the 1970s. This narrative is complemented by the story of the rise of computing and artificial intelligence. Mr. Woolfson also lingers admiringly on Har Gobind Khorana, a village clerk's son in British India who went on to synthesize the first fully artificial gene in 1972. And the author draws on the warning of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, evolutionary biologists who cautioned against reading every trait as a perfect adaptation.
Their point anchors his own: Evolution has no plan, settles for good enough and leaves the suboptimal everywhere.
Mr. Woolfson's thoughtful history and astute reading of the present state of biology -- including his account of why treatments for complex diseases have resisted us -- collide repeatedly with his insistence that we will soon be able to "transcend nature's imagination" and his singular conviction that this is where we ought to be headed. His formula -- AI to read life's grammar, synthesis to write it, authorship of species as the outcome -- recurs so often it begins to feel like an incantation. He acknowledges the technical hurdles and the profound ethical concerns and allows that his vision may never fully arrive, yet insists it would be wrong not to try. It's an audacious wager calibrated to the ambitions of our age and attuned to the capital behind it.
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Dr. Shaywitz is the chief medical scientist at Lore Health, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Ideas in the Wild --- Evolution shapes the world in ways humans can mimic. The challenge is discerning the elegant from the adequate. Shaywitz, David A. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 25 July 2026: C7.
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