What I told my students about the threats to evolutionary science
I was floored by the question, but it matters. With U.S. funding crashing, what will happen to the future of the field?
As my classes were ending this week, I gave students a chance to ask questions that might invite more speculative answers. The very first question struck a chord: "How threatened do you feel the current political climate is regarding human evolution, medical genetics, and your own research?”
Wow. That was a stunner.
My student wasn’t the first to ask. Many people have been asking me: How is the current political situation affecting my work, my research, my students?
I answered honestly.
First of all, I’m not at all worried about the political climate around evolution. The evolutionary view of life—one that integrates all organisms into a single evolutionary tree—is the foundation of biology itself. There is no biology that doesn’t rest on evolution. Likewise, there’s no way to study human genetics or human biology without recognizing the evolutionary processes that shaped us.
The centrality of evolution wasn’t always taken for granted in human genomics. When I was a student in the 1990s, human genetics courses focused on Mendelian disorders—like sickle cell anemia, Huntington’s disease, and other classical examples—and very often didn’t engage with the evolutionary context behind them.
Researchers like me, deeply interested in connecting genetics with fossil and archaeological evidence, were few and far between. For most human geneticists, natural selection was easy to ignore.
I told my students that the near future of these fields is very bright indeed. Hundreds of scientists now use human genetic data to study natural selection. More and more researchers extract and analyze ancient DNA from skeletons, yielding direct evidence of how gene frequencies have changed over time.
In short, human genetics has become an evolutionary science in a way that can’t be undone. You cannot meaningfully study how humans function or differ from one another without understanding how evolution has shaped us. Human genetics regularly produces insights that help understand the fossil and archaeological record, and those records now inform human genetics in ways that constantly surprise me. The pace of discovery in human origins has never equalled what we’ve seen during the last decade.
You can see it’s hard for me to set aside my fundamental optimism about where these sciences are going. That excitement keeps me going, and I’m sure it keeps you following along.
But I have to be honest, from the standpoint of funding and institutional support, these areas of science are facing serious challenges. Changes are coming so fast that it’s hard to keep up.
The current administration’s new budget proposals for the upcoming fiscal year include an almost 18-billion-dollar cut for the National Institutes of Health and a 4.5-billion-dollar cut to the National Science Foundation. That would slash the NIH by roughly a third, and NSF by almost half from last year’s expenditures.
Every day I hear about grants being terminated before their end dates. New funding and renewals are slowed or stopped. Indirect cost rates for federal funding, which were negotiated by institutions based on data of their actual costs for supporting research, have now been unilaterally cut by NIH and NSF down to 15% across the board.
This matters deeply. The NIH is the largest funder of health-related research in the world. Its budget is more than double that of all comparable international agencies combined. Yet even with its historic budgets the agency can fund only 15% to 25% of submitted research grants, depending on the area. Three out of four or more high-quality proposals don’t get funded.
One of the most troubling aspects of the current research climate is how difficult it has become to sustain a career in science. Scientists in many areas increasingly spend the bulk of their time writing grant applications rather than doing research.
Consider this: the type of research grant that funds most science at the NIH is called the R01, the bread and butter of the federal biomedical science. Most of these grants fund the salary of a postdoc or a handful of graduate students for a few years, plus supplies and equipment for experiments. In 2023, the median age of researchers just receiving their first R01 was over 43 years old. The median age for the first grant for NSF-funded researchers was 42 years old. Those aren’t the numbers for the average age of grantees. They’re the average age of researchers who are just receiving their first grant.
That brutal grant scene tends to determine the fates of researchers in human genetics. It was an unsustainable treadmill before. With paylines cut by as much as half, research funded by these agencies will more and more skew toward a limited set of priorities. Those priorities are not evolutionary biology or genetics.
In archaeology and anthropology, federal money has always been scarce. I have been applying to NSF for funding off and on for more than twenty years, both for myself and for dissertation projects for my students. Twenty years, so far no luck. Many of my applications received very positive reviews, but still didn’t make the cut for the small amount of funding available. I can report that I’ve had federal support at various times, at critical moments of my career: especially my graduate fellowship from the Department of Education and the Fulbright program. That fellowship is now gone, Fulbright—so important for international connections—targeted for cuts as well.
What worries me the most today is training the next generation of scientists. Will students still want to enter these fields? I fear they are turning away from evolutionary biology, human genetics, and medical research because they see the writing on the wall—shrinking opportunities, unstable funding, and diminishing support. These are the students we’re relying on to carry forward decades of progress.
With all this going on, I think about how I can move forward for my own students and my own research.
My commitment is to build connections for people who want to provide more support for work in human origins. I’ve moved now to Substack, and welcome to both old followers and new to this next version of the site. I’m aiming at some creative media and writing solutions over the next few months.
I think a lot of people assume that all kinds of science are driven by big federal dollars, and that unless they can give a major gift, they can’t really help. But in reality, it’s exactly the opposite. Most research in human origins is funded by foundations, universities, and private donors. My work has been almost entirely funded by university, foundation, and small individual contributions.
Here at this site, every member will be supporting research and education in human origins. That’s my commitment and I’m looking forward to sharing the results of those memberships here with all of you.
More and more, scholars are realizing that to sustain their work, they may need to step into the public sphere. That means talking to people, explaining why their research matters, and inviting others into the process. That’s not something every scientist signs up for—many would rather solve problems than talk with people. But ecosystem increasingly rewards those who engage, communicate, and collaborate broadly.
It’s a transition I’ve lived. I’m going to keep covering the research that moves people—because that is often the spark that fuels everything else: curiosity, investment, engagement, and ultimately, support. I invite you to keep following along.