Assisted Evolution
Assisted Evolution is the act of improving the genetics of a species. Ideally we won’t be required to do deep research projects on each species’ genomes, one at a time. There are some routes to avoid that scenario:
We can work on keystone species that will help several others by their flourishing. There are projects already working on this technique with warm water corals!
We can work on systems that are shared across many species and are quite fundamental. For example, heat shock proteins, metabolic efficiency, and dna repair mechanisms. These are ancient and identical in many species, but better versions could be found (in other species or by us) and then inserted into many species with replicable and scalable methods. We are exploring this with rubisco in crop plants. We would be using this knowledge to prevent extinctions and increase flourishing in nature.
The third way is to improve the microbiome - gut bacteria, soil bacteria, etc. Doing so can improve nutrient availability, disease resistance, and environmental health. This method is less invasive to individual species’ genomes and more easily deployed by distributing different microorganisms into the environment. It also avoids some favoritism. We are already doing this for coral known as “BMCs” or beneficial microbes for corals without modifying them beforehand.
This write up from Yale explores assisted evolution from teaching bilbies to avoid predators, to the manipulation of American Chestnut to resist chestnut blight.
All of these technologies are far away from deployment. Some are in research phases, others have identified the genes, very few have edited species, and none have been released into the wild. Blight resistant american chestnuts have been a program since 1980s. Gene editing began in 2006, in 2012 they found a gene that worked. By 2019 they had a desirable tree line tested for safety and in 2024 is their latest application for deregulation. ~ 10 years since the gene was identified and years to identify the gene. The cost of the program is at least 6.8 million since 2012.
Warm water resistant corals have at least $4million of funding in 2016 at the Oppen lab. 8 years later they are now testing their corals in the wild on the Great Barrier Reef.
15 years of work at CSIRO has produced corals with higher temperature resilience after a 4 year of lab testing. There was $6 million committed to CSIRO’s coral heat tolerance research in 2018. Australia has overall committed $2billion to “reefs” over the next decade, a smal part of which includes CSIRO’s work. Next steps are outlined in this 2024 paper, and mainly involve deploying and testing in the wild for several years tracking uptake of coral symbionts, scaling up production (while keeping genetic integrity and affordability), and eventually global deployment.
Overall, this intervention feels like it is not an immediate solution, but a long term necessity. Biotechnology of this calibre is still a ways off, and then applying it to wild species is yet further away. Fundamentally changing basic cellular processes seems unlikely to be easily improved over time-tested versions by evolution, but I would estimate that there are some opportunities. Then deciding which species to apply this to is a moral dilemma. Overall this feels really important to address as the caretakers of the earth, but it’s difficult to see any immediate or clear paths forward in this area. Long term, this needs to be pursued.