Nothing in biology makes any sense outside of the context of evolution.
There certainly is to evolution’s counterpart/subpart, intelligent design with genetically modified organisms. Also it could be said that technology itself is part of evolution, sort of a end game of evolution.
This is not directly addressing the OP, but I think it’s still on topic. I’d say that no technology depends on any theory. A theory is an idea about how things work; technology depends on how things actually work. The theory might lead you to make some predictions that, absent that particular theory, you may not have otherwise made, and then that might lead to a new technology. But, still, it’s the prediction that depends on the theory, not the technology. What happens more often is that a theory will lead to a prediction, which implies a technology, but then the technology doesn’t work quite that way, so you go back and adjust the theory. In that way, theory depends more on tech than vice versa.
But the breeding of animals and crops for specific traits is not a prerequisite of agriculture. People were probably planting seeds and harvesting crops for a while before they realized that the traits were heritable and thus manipulatable. In fact, farmers would get by just fine in a universe where all species were immutable. Mind you, they’d be stuck with the types and quality of plants and animals available in nature. On the other hand, they wouldn’t need to worry about things like pests and pathogens becoming resistant to agricultural pesticides and antibiotics.
“Directed evolution” is an oxymoron. Evolution is, by definition, not directed.
Of course evolution is directed. It is directed by differential reproduction.
The conversation has the usual problem when someone asks about “evolution.” Usually they mean “evolution by natural selection” aka “Darwinian evolution.” Without qualification the question is almost meaningless. All around us things evolve. This thread will evolve. It is reasonable to include artificial selection as well, but one needs to be clear about what is meant.
As Sage_Rat alludes to, genetic algorithms (GAs) are a well developed technique for system optimisation. They are more widespread than people realise, but not a trivial thing to use. The core idea is almost exactly Darwinian evolution, although the selection criteria are artificially turned into reproductive success by the controlling algorithm.
The core idea is to represent the configuration of some entity by a “genome”. The manner in which a genome is coded is part of the real art of using GAs. You need to find a way of parametrising your entities with a limited set of controls that are able to drive the entity across the available configurations efficiently and in a meaningful manner. Then you need to work out a fitness function, one that evaluates the fitness of each generated entity. You let the GA system loose, and it mutates the genome and culls the resulting populace. The settings on the mutation algorithm are important as well. The idea is that mutations can cause the resultant entity to leap over a set of poor configurations to a good configuration that a simple combinatorial search of the local parameter space would never find (because each change was leading to worse and worse results.) Part of the art is to mutate with big leaps just enough to keep getting interesting possibilities, but not so much that the system is little more than a random search. You need lots of little changes to explore the possibilities of the configuration and to optimise it, and the occasional leap (punctuated evolution perhaps) that will usually lead to a dead end, but occasionally lead to something interesting.
Just about all of these problems are characterised as hill climbing. Given only an altimeter and a compass, how do you find the highest peak whilst the land is enveloped in fog? Other techniques - such as simulated annealing, also seek to make jumps from local maxima, over valleys, to find alternative hills to climb and perhaps find higher peaks.
GAs are an exemplar of evolution via selection, in that selection is based upon an intrinsically defined and unchanging function of “fitness”, where there there is some notion of “fitness for purpose”. You could argue that this is either natural or artificial selection. (Artificial selection is what occurs when breeding animals or plants to select for a particular trait, whereas natural selection is all about ability to pass on the genome.) What makes it a technology based upon evolutionary theory is simply the idea that this is an effective, efficient, and fast way to get to a better result. Indeed usually where any other mechanism, such as combinatorial expansion of the configuration space is simply infeasible, or simple hill-climbing algorithms (like conjugate gradient methods) lead to local maxima and fail to adequately explore the possibilities.
Evolution via natural selection is not directed. Evolution via artificial selection is directed. It is directed by whoever is the artificial selector. The problem of course being that “evolution” is not a valid shorthand for “evolution via natural selection” although in modern conversations is usually is taken to be so.
That’s wrong. At is simplest, evolution is defined as any change in a population’s gene frequencies. It doesn’t matter what the cause is.
In any case, you would have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between “directed” and “undirected.” Humans select traits in domestic animals both deliberately and inadvertently. And we also cause selection on non-domestic animals.
This is my answer. The entire field of biology is based on evolution and natural selection. So, all biotechnology?
All technology, at the very least has a “theory of operation”. Which is in turn based on a more general theory of how the world works. For example, the theory of operation of cellular phones includes the idea that you exchange wireless messages with a local cellular antenna tower. Which in turn is based on the theory of electromagnetic radiation, mathematically defined by Maxwell and tested by Hertz. It also rests on Shannon’s information theory, and a lot of the successes and failures of the theories of operation of previous generations of wireless radio technology.
In short, I think you are wrong. All technology depends on its own theory of operation at the very least, or it would never have been built. The theory of operation is in turn dependent on at least some theoretical model of the real world the inventor held, however flawed. There were an awful lot of would-be pilots who failed because their theory of heavier-than-air flight was deeply flawed, for example. The Wright Brothers spent years of trial and error refining their own theories before they built a successful airplane.
An understanding of evolution and evolutionary theory informs nearly all aspects of medicine, as well as epidemiology, plant and animal breeding, forestry, fisheries and wildlife management, and nearly anything else connected to biology.
The OP is asking about “the theory of evolution”, comparing it with gravity and relativity. I took it to mean that he was asking about the theory of evolution by natural selection, which is generally what is meant by that term.
Any time a scientist uses a model system (testing drugs in mice, developing a mouse model for a human disease, gene discovery in yeast etc) in order to generalize the information to humans, or all species in general, we are exploiting evolution. When we say that a mouse can be a first approximation of a human or studying a yeast version of a gene teaches how basic cell mechanics work, these ideas are predicated on evolution.
He didn’t say that; he just asked about the “theory of evolution.” The theory of evolution at its most basic simply means descent with modification, that is, that modern organisms have evolved from earlier ones (rather than being independently created, for example).
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection provided a fundamental mechanism for how evolutionary change occurs in nature. However, modern evolutionary theory incorporates other evolutionary processes beyond natural selection, including genetic drift, meiotic drive, epigenetic factors, and others.
Descent with modification provides insights for modern biology; the mechanism of natural selection by which such modifications take place provides additional insights; and the other factors beyond natural selection allow for further refinements.
I’m struggling to come up with concrete examples of how evolutionary theory is deeply intertwined with the entirety of biology. It’s really everywhere. For reference, I’m a biologist studying signaling proteins. To come up with some examples, I’ll simply survey the various things I’ve printed out and pinned next to my desk:
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A phylogenetic tree showing the relationships between families of proteins, across major animal taxa. On this, I’ve annotated the presence of a protein motif of interest, which appears to have several independent evolutionary origins.
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A multiple sequence alignment of a particular subset of the family, showing more specifically which protein domains and sequences are conserved, and which are unique.
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A secondary structure prediction of one particular protein, which is based on a massive database of protein sequence alignments, which in turn are generated using evolutionary relationships.
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A tertiary structure prediction, based on alignments and evolutionary conservation between a protein with unknown structure and other proteins with known structures.
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A gene ontology analysis showing predicted functions of a class of proteins that interact with a protein motif that I’m studying.
These are just a handful of the tools that a molecular biologist or biochemist would use to do their experiments. Biotech and pharma companies rely on similar tools, all built on evolutionary theory, to develop treatments.
Vaguely related: a time-lapse video of bacteria evolving.
How dependent is finding oil and minerals on the identification of appropriate strata, including the presence of indicator fossils in those strata?
The use of index fossils predates Darwin’s theory of evolution. You don’t have to believe that species evolved to use index fossils, just be able to recognize them and know where they are found.
Depends on how efficient you want to be at it. Given enough time and money, anyone can strike oil by drilling at random.