The following is an excerpt of a recent interview by Ernie Hood, who hosts the "Radio in Vivo" program on WCOM-FM in Carrboro about science and scientists in the Triangle. Hood recently interviewed Allen Rodrigo, director of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, a scholarly think tank devoted to evolutionary biology. Sponsored by Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University, the organization is funded by the National Science Foundation. The interview has been edited.
Q: Would you give us a quick overview of what NESCent is and what it's been able to accomplish in its six years of existence?
NESCent is funded to make sure that we have a platform, a facility for evolutionary scientists in the U.S. and worldwide to come together, share ideas, develop new ways of thinking about biological data and data that has an evolutionary bent, and develop new knowledge. NESCent is not there to actually generate thedata itself.
For a long while, evolutionary science was focusing on biology. We want to know how viruses evolve; we want to know how organisms are related to each other and how organisms evolve. But now, people are thinking about how society evolves, how culture evolves, how computer programs evolve. So evolution has broadened its scope beyond biology to the social institutions, to institutions in medicine, and NESCent is at the forefront of that.
Q: Are human beings evolving? If so, in what way, and how quickly?
Some people have said we've stopped evolving, in the sense that our genetic makeup is not changing and the way we look is not changing. But what's happening is that culture has taken over - the ability of culture and our social institutions to actually wrap around us, an outer skin, as it were, and it is that outer skin that evolves. Other people are saying, "Well, that's not true - we can look at our genes, and we can show that our genetic makeup has changed over time."
What we can say, I think, is that the rate of change in our environment is such that if there are biological changes taking place in humans, they are not taking place at a rate that's fast enough to cope with the rate of change that is happening in our environment. There is a mismatch between what we are as genetic individuals, as biological individuals, and what we have to be as individuals who live in a particular environment.
Can we catch up with that? Or do we alter our environment so that we slow the pace down? One of the suggestions, for instance, has been to alter our dietary habits - because, of course, that's tied in to our physiological makeup, our biological makeup.
Another exciting idea is that psychologically, we're not used to living in big cities. So perhaps one way of thinking about a lot of the psychological syndromes that we have is that they are a consequence of our lifestyle.
