The Center for Evolution is an exciting new Rice endeavor bringing researchers from across the sciences together to develop tools and approaches based on evolutionary principles.
Application of the principles of evolution can provide solutions to problems confronting us today. The new century will be shaped by our understanding of evolution and the role it plays in the interaction of humanity with the planet and by how well we harness evolutionary principles for biotechnology and medicine. Human diseases are caused either by infectious agents in evolutionary conflict with their hosts, and by relics from our evolutionary past. Cooperation and conflict are increasingly understood in an evolutionary framework. The increasing availability of genomes allows for comparative studies that provide insight into how genes interact, their form, and how they may be manipulated to make novel products by synthetic evolution.