Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Nature’s Hidden Logic

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Nature’s Hidden Logic,” a look at how natural selection and evolution are being harnessed to solve today’s problems, with Owen Jones, professor of law and of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University and author of Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution's Deepest Logic—and Putting It to Use.

Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/highline-nature-logic .]

Research shows that deep misconceptions about how natural selection actually works are surprisingly common, even among biology teachers and medical students.

Those misunderstandings don't just affect our understanding of the past. They also can cost us opportunities and undermine our efforts to reach our goals. They sometimes even imperil lives, having previously led us, for example, to rely on cancer treatments that actually made cancer stronger.

Join Vanderbilt University professor Owen Jones for a talk that will show you how natural selection is far more than a process that helped shape life on Earth. It is one of nature's most powerful problem-solving frameworks and one of today's most underused tools for innovation. NASA, for example, designed a better satellite antenna using evolution rather than engineering alone.

Drawing on fascinating examples from medicine, artificial intelligence, engineering, psychology, economics, law, and beyond, Professor Jones will show how evolutionary thinking is already helping scientists improve cancer treatments, design remarkable new technologies, and solve problems that have resisted conventional approaches.

You'll leave with a new understanding of how natural selection actually works and why it matters far beyond biology. You’ll see how thinking more like nature can help us build smarter technologies, wiser policies, and a more resilient future. (Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Wildebeest crossing a river. (Photo by Eric Inafuku / Creative Commons.)