NASA had a big – and little – problem. For a small satellite, the agency needed a tiny antenna, with very specific communication capabilities and very strict limits on size and weight. The agency gave the problem to a design team adept at simulating the way natural selection engineers solutions.
Design using natural selection is based on a simple but powerful idea with broad applications across the world: When variation in replicable traits exists, and some variants succeed more than do others, those to larger and larger percentages of future populations. For instance, early gazelles that happened to be faster were harder for predators to catch, so they were – generation after generation – more likely than slower gazelles to live, reproduce and pass on their capabilities for higher speed.
The NASA team adapted that idea to work inside a computer. They first created two very rough “parent” programs for designing the antenna. They then bred them together, creating digital “offspring” that shared varying halves of each parent, mimicking sexual recombination. To mimic mutation, some coding elements were randomly switched from 0s to 1s, and vice versa. The were kept to become the , while the rest were discarded.
Repeated over many cycles, this process quickly refined the programs that until a design outperformed a human-designed version – with – and took less time to develop. It was built, was launched into space in 2006, and performed admirably for the planned 90-day duration of the mission.
To , as a , that success points to a broader truth: When people harness the logic of natural selection, they can often find to solve complex problems. As I explore in my book, “,” natural selection is the in the history of life.
Deepening understanding
Ignoring the power of natural selection can mean missing opportunities – or making things worse.
For example, consider fishing: As global demand for fish has grown, industrial fishing has become highly efficient at removing all the individuals above a certain size. Anything small enough to survives; anything larger dies. At first that might seem sensible: Take the big fish and leave the small ones to grow.
But that strategy shifts the factors that work to change the population for generations to come.
are more likely than larger ones to . Over time, the spreads. The result is a population composed primarily of . For instance, a 2025 study found that heavily fished Baltic Cod became from 1996 to 2019.
The consequences compound. Smaller adult females produce far fewer eggs. In Atlantic Cod, for instance, a female that is one-half as large as a 66-pound female doesn’t lay 50% of the number of eggs; she lays – and , reducing the energy available to boost the chances of survival.
By ignoring how selection pressures work, the fishing industry has ended up breeding its future generations primarily from smaller fish with less reproductive ability. That has shrunk not only the average size of adults but also their overall numbers – and .
Treating cancer
Across many fields, tuning into the evolutionary results of selection offers powerful – and often underused – insight.
Medical scientists increasingly understand the dynamic by which has helped to foster the . Killing off the bacteria that are easiest to kill reduces competition for the more resistant ones.
That insight has inspired a , called .
Tumors tend to consist of cells that vary in their resistance to cancer treatments.
Traditional approaches assume that eradication of all cancer cells should be the goal. But efforts to eradicate often backfire and kill the patient too, because , have newly lessened competition, and consequently thrive and expand.
By contrast, adaptive therapy aims to keep the most dangerous cancer cells in check by preserving some of the treatment-susceptible cancer cells to compete with them. When a tumor starts to grow, . When a tumor starts to shrink, doctors dose less.
For some patients, over significantly longer periods, even if – and in fact precisely because – this treatment the cancer.
A world of opportunities
Other engineers are finding even more sources of untapped inspiration in the solutions natural selection has already designed.
The nose of a Japanese bullet train, for example, was , a bird natural selection enabled to dive into water with minimal splash. The result was a train.
The remarkably , a fish that evolved among the voracious piranha, inspired new approaches to .
A gecko’s ability to walk upside down on glass, with harnessing the , inspired a new .
Beyond physical attributes
Natural selection doesn’t only operate on anatomical or physical traits. It also works on behavioral traits.
In psychology, natural selection perspectives are showing how human brains – which have been shaped by natural selection to process information in ways that influence behaviors – incorporate some forms of information more easily than identical information conveyed in a different way. For instance, people are far better at calculating the conditional probabilities of various risks when those are expressed in than when expressed in the , such as “0.3” or “30%.” That’s because for 99% of human history, information arrived into brains mainly as whole integers – as people, things and events.
In law, this perspective is illuminating such insights as the origins of the in . There is evidence that natural selection has favored the propensity of a person to notice when they are being treated inequitably, to remember who is behind it and to respond negatively both in the present and in the future.
In economics, far above the maximum price they would have paid to acquire it. There is evidence that this tendency, known as the , was favored by natural selection when bargains were risky in a pre-modern world, a time when giving over one item, in trade for another, might risk getting nothing at all from an untrustworthy trading partner.
But makes less sense in the context of modern economic innovations like legal rights, banks and laws, and with mechanisms to enforce bargains, such as police and litigation. This is therefore part of a larger research stream that centers on the ways that some modern problems stem from a mismatch between our evolved brains and our modern human environments, which have changed dramatically in an eye-blink of evolutionary time.
What all this means is that the logic of natural selection has enormous practical value: It can help us identify problems, inspire new solutions, and recognize when our own actions are silently undermining our goals.
Original article
Comments