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The economics of managing evolution

Humans are altering biological systems at unprecedented rates, and these alterations often have longer-term evolutionary impacts. Most obvious is the spread of resistance to pesticides and antibiotics. There are a wide variety of management strategies available to slow this evolution, and there are...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Day, Troy, Kennedy, David A., Read, Andrew F., McAdams, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8594813/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34784349
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001409
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author Day, Troy
Kennedy, David A.
Read, Andrew F.
McAdams, David
author_facet Day, Troy
Kennedy, David A.
Read, Andrew F.
McAdams, David
author_sort Day, Troy
collection PubMed
description Humans are altering biological systems at unprecedented rates, and these alterations often have longer-term evolutionary impacts. Most obvious is the spread of resistance to pesticides and antibiotics. There are a wide variety of management strategies available to slow this evolution, and there are many reasons for using them. In this paper, we focus on the economic aspects of evolution management and ask: When is it economically beneficial for an individual decision-maker to invest in evolution management? We derive a simple dimensionless inequality showing that it is cost-effective to manage evolution when the percentage increase in the effective life span of the biological resource that management generates is larger than the percentage increase in annual profit that could be obtained by not managing evolution. We show how this inequality can be used to determine optimal investment choices for single decision-makers, to determine Nash equilibrium investment choices for multiple interacting decision-makers, and to examine how these equilibrium choices respond to regulatory interventions aimed at stimulating investment in evolution management. Our results are illustrated with examples involving Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) crops and antibiotic use in fish farming.
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spelling pubmed-85948132021-11-17 The economics of managing evolution Day, Troy Kennedy, David A. Read, Andrew F. McAdams, David PLoS Biol Research Article Humans are altering biological systems at unprecedented rates, and these alterations often have longer-term evolutionary impacts. Most obvious is the spread of resistance to pesticides and antibiotics. There are a wide variety of management strategies available to slow this evolution, and there are many reasons for using them. In this paper, we focus on the economic aspects of evolution management and ask: When is it economically beneficial for an individual decision-maker to invest in evolution management? We derive a simple dimensionless inequality showing that it is cost-effective to manage evolution when the percentage increase in the effective life span of the biological resource that management generates is larger than the percentage increase in annual profit that could be obtained by not managing evolution. We show how this inequality can be used to determine optimal investment choices for single decision-makers, to determine Nash equilibrium investment choices for multiple interacting decision-makers, and to examine how these equilibrium choices respond to regulatory interventions aimed at stimulating investment in evolution management. Our results are illustrated with examples involving Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) crops and antibiotic use in fish farming. Public Library of Science 2021-11-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8594813/ /pubmed/34784349 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001409 Text en © 2021 Day et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Day, Troy
Kennedy, David A.
Read, Andrew F.
McAdams, David
The economics of managing evolution
title The economics of managing evolution
title_full The economics of managing evolution
title_fullStr The economics of managing evolution
title_full_unstemmed The economics of managing evolution
title_short The economics of managing evolution
title_sort economics of managing evolution
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8594813/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34784349
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001409
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