Vanderbilt Professor: Evolution Can Solve Today's Problems

When a Nevada woman died from an infection in 2016, doctors had tried all 26 antibiotics available in the United States. The bacteria had simply evolved faster than medicine could keep up.

Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, says this tragedy points to a much bigger problem. We're making costly mistakes by treating evolution as ancient history instead of a powerful force shaping our present and future.

His new book, "Force of Nature," argues that natural selection isn't just about dinosaurs and Darwin. It's a living process happening all around us every single day, from hospital infections to how we make decisions.

The bacteria that killed the Nevada patient weren't created in a lab or imported from some exotic location. They were ordinary bacteria doing what all living things do: adapting to survive when faced with pressure.

Jones believes most of us learned the basics of evolution in high school but never connected those lessons to real-world problems. When organisms have traits that can be passed down, variation in those traits, and different rates of reproductive success, evolution happens automatically.

Why This Inspires

Jones's work bridges two worlds that rarely talk to each other: biology and human systems like law, medicine, and decision-making. By recognizing that we're part of nature rather than separate from it, we can tap into 3.5 billion years of problem-solving intelligence.

The antibiotic crisis shows what happens when we ignore evolutionary pressures. But the flip side is equally powerful: understanding these forces could help us design better drugs, create more effective policies, and make smarter choices about everything from public health to criminal justice.

Evolution has been testing solutions and discarding failures for billions of years. That's an unmatched research and development lab, and it's free for us to study.

Jones isn't suggesting we copy nature blindly or fall into the trap of saying whatever is natural is good. He's advocating for evolutionary literacy: understanding how selection pressures work so we can anticipate problems and design solutions that work with natural forces instead of against them.

The lesson from that Nevada hospital isn't just about bacteria winning one battle. It's about recognizing that evolution never stops, and neither should our efforts to understand it.