Nice commentary / viewpoint piece in PLOS Biology last months: PLOS Biology: Evolutionary Biology for the 21st Century
Citation.Jonathan Losos, Stevan J. Arnold, Gill Bejerano, E. D. Brodie III, David Hibbett, Hopi E. Hoekstra, David P. Mindell, Antónia Monteiro, Craig Moritz, H. Allen Orr, Dmitri A. Petrov, Susanne S. Renner, Robert E. Ricklefs, Pamela S. Soltis, Thomas L. Turner (2013) Evolutionary Biology for the 21st Century. PLoS Biol 11(1): e1001466. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001466They discuss issues like Biodiversity Informatics (see Figure to the left) and evolutionary applications like evolutionary medicine, food production, sustaining biodiversity, computational algorithms, and justice. They also discuss issues like the oncoming onslaught of specimens and the need to link up with museums who have expertise in dealing with such issues. Anyway - it is worth a look. Not the most visionary of pieces ever but it has some concrete suggestions and predictions that will be of use.
Yeah, many not very visionary, but a nice summation of trends out there -- and I'm glad that "evolutionary justice" was referring to the very real trend to use phylogenies as evidence in court cases (as David Hillis used as an expert witness) rather than some fuzzy handwaving about how "justice" as an abstract concept gave cave men an selective advantage or something.
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