Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.
Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
PLoS Biol. 2021 Nov 16;19(11):e3001409. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001409. eCollection 2021 Nov.
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.
人类正在以前所未有的速度改变生物系统，而这些改变往往会对长期进化产生影响。最明显的是对杀虫剂和抗生素的耐药性的传播。有各种各样的管理策略可以用来减缓这种进化，并且有很多使用它们的原因。在本文中，我们专注于进化管理的经济方面，并提出以下问题：对于个体决策者来说，何时在进化管理方面进行投资在经济上是有益的？我们推导出一个简单的无量纲不等式，表明当管理产生的生物资源有效寿命的百分比增加大于不管理进化可能获得的年利润百分比增加时，管理进化是具有成本效益的。我们展示了如何使用这个不等式来确定单个决策者的最佳投资选择，确定多个相互作用的决策者的纳什均衡投资选择，并研究这些均衡选择如何响应旨在刺激进化管理投资的监管干预。我们用涉及苏云金芽孢杆菌（Bt）作物和鱼类养殖中抗生素使用的例子来说明我们的结果。
