At six year intervals since 1998, members of the evolutionary biology community have convened to discuss future research directions in the discipline. In recent years, evolutionary biology has grown at an enormously accelerating rate. The discipline is now awash in comparative genomic data, and major conceptual and empirical advances have been made in several areas. In June of 2011, the American Society of Naturalists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution will hold a two-day workshop to discuss future directions in evolutionary biology. The goal of the workshop will be to outline important areas for future research directions, and how scientific societies and the field at large can act to advance such research. This workshop will be the first of such society-sponsored events that will allow an ongoing dialog within the evolutionary research community on the assessment and development of focal areas for research.
This grant provided funding to convene a diverse group of experts to discuss future directions in that field. Fifteen committee members from fields as disparate as genomics, physiology, systematics and ecology met for two days in June, 2011. The group discussed challenges facing the field and opportunities arising as the result of new technological and conceptual developments. Evolutionary biology was seen to have applications to many aspects of human health and welfare, including medicine, food production, biodiversity conservation, computation and engineering. In the context of the importance of evolutionary biology, future areas of importance include the development of new theory that can accommodate the new sources of data now available from genomics and other areas, increasing the ability to analyze and understand the enormous quantity of data now obtainable, studying the evolutionary processes responsible for genetic and phenotypic variation in populations, understanding how the earth has change through time and how biodiversity has evolved. Logistical issues, such as how to build appropriately integrative infrastructure, were also seen as important logistical challenges. After the meeting, committee members worked to draft a manuscript summarizing our findings and recommendations. The paper, entitled "Evolutionary Biology for the 21st Century," was published in PLoS Biology early in 2013.
