Sublime

In order to make the case for evolution by natural selection, it was essential to establish that there was sufficient within-species heritable variability:

GBIRd wanted Thomas’s help designing a very particular kind of mouse drive—a so-called “suppression drive.” A suppression drive is designed to defeat natural selection entirely. Its purpose is to spread a trait so deleterious that it can wipe out a population. Researchers in Britain have already engineered a suppression drive for Anopheles gambiae

“Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” by Bettencourt, et al. A thoughtful layperson’s introduction to Kleiber’s law and its application to urban culture can be found in George Johnson’s “Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale.”

Price equation.31 It is the fundamental relation expressing how changes in any population average are the result of the combined effect of a variation in frequencies of types (selection or sorting; first term) and changes in the quantities themselves over time (transmission or endogenous growth; second term).

some form of complexity theory is required if we are to understand many of the intimate, and patently uncertain, interactions found in modern society.

Some of these Hymenoptera are lazy and sit around all day doing very little; others work their tails off in the interest of the community. But try separating the ne’er-do-wells from the industrious and setting them up as two new colonies—one composed exclusively of layabouts and the other made up entirely of nose-to-the-grindstone types. A strange

In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves. In such a world, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, people can—again, in principle—determine the outcome.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully t