Universal Darwinism

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Universal Darwinism, also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, [1] or Darwinian metaphysics, [2] [3] [4] is a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, linguistics, economics, culture, medicine, computer science, and physics.

Contents

Basic mechanisms

At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process. This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape) for the ones that are best adapted. The process has three components:

After those fit variants are retained, they can again undergo variation, either directly or in their offspring, starting a new round of the iteration. The overall mechanism is similar to the problem-solving procedures of trial-and-error or generate-and-test: evolution can be seen as searching for the best solution for the problem of how to survive and reproduce by generating new trials, testing how well they perform, eliminating the failures, and retaining the successes.

The generalization made in "universal" Darwinism is to replace "organism" by any recognizable pattern, phenomenon, or system. The first requirement is that the pattern can "survive" (maintain, be retained) long enough or "reproduce" (replicate, be copied) sufficiently frequently so as not to disappear immediately. This is the heredity component: the information in the pattern must be retained or passed on. The second requirement is that during survival and reproduction variation (small changes in the pattern) can occur. The final requirement is that there is a selective "preference" so that certain variants tend to survive or reproduce "better" than others. If these conditions are met, then, by the logic of natural selection, the pattern will evolve towards more adapted forms.

Examples of patterns that have been postulated to undergo variation and selection, and thus adaptation, are genes, ideas (memes), theories, technologies, neurons and their connections, words, computer programs, firms, antibodies, institutions, law and judicial systems, quantum states and even whole universes. [5]

History and development

Conceptually, "evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena" preceded Darwin, [6] but was still lacking the concept of natural selection. Darwin himself, together with subsequent 19th-century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, James Mark Baldwin and William James, was quick to apply the idea of selection to other domains, such as language, psychology, society, and culture. [7] However, this evolutionary tradition was largely banned from the social sciences in the beginning of the 20th century, in part because of the bad reputation of social Darwinism, an attempt to use Darwinism to justify social inequality.[ citation needed ]

Starting in the 1950s, Donald T. Campbell was one of the first and most influential authors to revive the tradition, and to formulate a generalized Darwinian algorithm directly applicable to phenomena outside of biology. [8] In this, he was inspired by William Ross Ashby's view of self-organization and intelligence as fundamental processes of selection. [9] His aim was to explain the development of science and other forms of knowledge by focusing on the variation and selection of ideas and theories, thus laying the basis for the domain of evolutionary epistemology. In the 1990s, Campbell's formulation of the mechanism of "blind-variation-and-selective-retention" (BVSR) was further developed and extended to other domains under the labels of "universal selection theory" [10] or "universal selectionism" [11] by his disciples Gary Cziko, [12] [13] Mark Bickhard, [14] and Francis Heylighen. [15] [16]

Richard Dawkins may have first coined the term "universal Darwinism" in 1983 to describe his conjecture that any possible life forms existing outside the solar system would evolve by natural selection just as they do on Earth. [17] This conjecture was also presented in 1983 in a paper entitled “The Darwinian Dynamic” that dealt with the evolution of order in living systems and certain nonliving physical systems. [18] It was suggested “that ‘life’, wherever it might exist in the universe, evolves according to the same dynamical law” termed the Darwinian dynamic. Henry Plotkin in his 1997 book [19] on Darwin machines makes the link between universal Darwinism and Campbell's evolutionary epistemology. Susan Blackmore, in her 1999 book The Meme Machine , devotes a chapter titled 'Universal Darwinism' to a discussion of the applicability of the Darwinian process to a wide range of scientific subject matters.

The philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett, in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea , developed the idea of a Darwinian process, involving variation, selection and retention, as a generic algorithm that is substrate-neutral and could be applied to many fields of knowledge outside of biology. He described the idea of natural selection as a "universal acid" that cannot be contained in any vessel, as it seeps through the walls and spreads ever further, touching and transforming ever more domains. He notes in particular the field of memetics in the social sciences. [20] [13]

In agreement with Dennett's prediction, over the past decades the Darwinian perspective has spread ever more widely, in particular across the social sciences as the foundation for numerous schools of study including memetics, evolutionary economics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, neural Darwinism, and evolutionary linguistics. [21] Researchers have postulated Darwinian processes as operating at the foundations of physics, cosmology and chemistry via the theories of quantum Darwinism, [22] observation selection effects and cosmological natural selection. [23] [24] Similar mechanisms are extensively applied in computer science in the domains of genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation, which develop solutions to complex problems via a process of variation and selection.

Author D. B. Kelley has formulated one of the most all-encompassing approaches to universal Darwinism. In his 2013 book The Origin of Phenomena, he holds that natural selection involves not the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, as shown by Darwin, but the preservation of favored systems in contention for existence. The fundamental mechanism behind all such stability and evolution is therefore what Kelley calls "survival of the fittest systems." [25] Because all systems are cyclical, the Darwinian processes of iteration, variation and selection are operative not only among species but among all natural phenomena both large-scale and small. Kelley thus maintains that, since the Big Bang especially, the universe has evolved from a highly chaotic state to one that is now highly ordered with many stable phenomena, naturally selected. [25]

Examples of universal Darwinist theories

The following approaches can all be seen as exemplifying a generalization of Darwinian ideas outside of their original domain of biology. These "Darwinian extensions" can be grouped in two categories, depending on whether they discuss implications of biological (genetic) evolution in other disciplines (e.g. medicine or psychology), or discuss processes of variation and selection of entities other than genes (e.g. computer programs, firms or ideas). However, there is no strict separation possible, since most of these approaches (e.g. in sociology, psychology and linguistics) consider both genetic and non-genetic (e.g. cultural) aspects of evolution, as well as the interactions between them (see e.g. gene-culture coevolution).

Gene-based Darwinian extensions

Other Darwinian extensions

Books

Related Research Articles

<i>Darwins Dangerous Idea</i> 1995 book by Daniel Dennett

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so.

Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.

Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme," citing examples such as musical tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natural selection</span> Mechanism of evolution by differential survival and reproduction of individuals

Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which is intentional, whereas natural selection is not.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neural Darwinism</span> Theory in neurology

Neural Darwinism is a biological, and more specifically Darwinian and selectionist, approach to understanding global brain function, originally proposed by American biologist, researcher and Nobel-Prize recipient Gerald Maurice Edelman. Edelman's 1987 book Neural Darwinism introduced the public to the theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS), a theory that attempts to explain global brain function.

A Darwin machine is a machine that, like a Turing machine, involves an iteration process that yields a high-quality result, but, whereas a Turing machine uses logic, the Darwin machine uses rounds of variation, selection, and inheritance.

Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions. As a branch of inquiry in epistemology, evolutionary epistemology lies at the crossroads of philosophy and evolutionary biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Heylighen</span> Belgian cyberneticist (born 1960)

Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition". He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their problems.

Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have argued that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald T. Campbell</span> American social scientist

Donald Thomas Campbell was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term evolutionary epistemology and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Campbell as the 33rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

Cultural selection theory is the study of cultural change modelled on theories of evolutionary biology. Cultural selection theory has so far never been a separate discipline. However it has been proposed that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and "the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution". In addition to Darwin's work the term historically covers a diverse range of theories from both the sciences and the humanities including those of Lamark, politics and economics e.g. Bagehot, anthropology e.g. Edward B. Tylor, literature e.g. Ferdinand Brunetière, evolutionary ethics e.g. Leslie Stephen, sociology e.g. Albert Keller, anthropology e.g. Bronislaw Malinowski, Biosciences e.g. Alex Mesoudi, geography e.g. Richard Ormrod, sociobiology and biodiversity e.g. E.O. Wilson, computer programming e.g. Richard Brodie, and other fields e.g. Neoevolutionism, and Evolutionary archaeology.

Darwinian literary studies is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection, including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend of neo-Darwinian thought in intellectual disciplines beyond those traditionally considered as evolutionary biology: evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, affective neuroscience, behavioural genetics, evolutionary epistemology, and other such disciplines.

The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection. Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior. E. O. Wilson's landmark 1975 book, Sociobiology, synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in animals, including humans. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby popularized the term "evolutionary psychology" in their 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture. Like sociobiology before it, evolutionary psychology has been embroiled in controversy, but evolutionary psychologists see their field as gaining increased acceptance overall.

The concept of conscious evolution refers to the theoretical ability of human beings to become conscious participants in the evolution of their cultures, or even of the entirety of human society, based on a relatively recent combination of factors, including increasing awareness of cultural and social patterns, reaction against perceived problems with existing patterns, injustices, inequities, and other factors. The realization that cultural and social evolution can be guided through conscious decisions has been in increasing evidence since approximately the mid-19th century, when the rate of cultural change globally began to increase dramatically. The Industrial Revolution, reactions against the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of new sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, the revolution in global communication, the interaction of diverse cultures through transportation and colonization, anti-slavery and suffrage movements, and increasing human lifespan all would contribute to the growing awareness of social and cultural patterns as being potentially subject to conscious evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of evolution</span> Overview of and topical guide to change in the heritable characteristics of organisms

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to evolution:

Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.

There are two main approaches currently used to analyze archaeological remains from an evolutionary perspective: evolutionary archaeology and behavioral ecology. The former assumes that cultural change observed in the archaeological record can be best explained by the direct action of natural selection and other Darwinian processes on heritable variation in artifacts and behavior. The latter assumes that cultural and behavioral change results from phenotypic adaptations to varying social and ecological environments. 

The philosophy of evolution is the branch of philosophy that examines the philosophical implications of evolution and the intersections of evolutionary biology with other fields such as epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy.

References

  1. ↑ Hodgson, G. M. (2005). "Generalizing Darwinism to social evolution: Some early attempts". Journal of Economic Issues. 39 (4): 899–914. doi:10.1080/00213624.2005.11506859. ISSN   0021-3624. S2CID   12023696.
  2. ↑ von Sydow, M. (2012). From Darwinian Metaphysics towards Understanding the Evolution of Evolutionary Mechanisms. A Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Gene-Darwinism and Universal Darwinism. Universitätsverlag Göttingen.
  3. ↑ von Sydow, M. (2013). Darwinian Metaphysics (pp. 1306–1314). In A. Runehov & L. Oviedo (Eds.). Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Heidelberg, New York: Springer Science [doi: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8].
  4. ↑ von Sydow, M. (2014). ‘Survival of the Fittest’ in Darwinian Metaphysics – Tautology or Testable Theory? (pp. 199–222) In E. Voigts, B. Schaff &M. Pietrzak-Franger (Eds.). Reflecting on Darwin. Farnham, London: Ashgate.
  5. ↑ Campbell, John (2009). Bayesian Methods and Universal Darwinism. AIP Conf. Proc. 1193, 40, doi : 10.1063/1.3275642. 40–47.
  6. ↑ Nelson, Richard R. (January 2007). "Universal Darwinism and evolutionary social science". Biology and Philosophy. 22 (1). Springer Netherlands: 73–94. doi:10.1007/s10539-005-9005-7. ISSN   1572-8404. S2CID   143551363. [...] evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena has a long tradition, going back well before Darwin.
  7. ↑ Hodgson, G. M. (2005). Generalizing Darwinism to social evolution: Some early attempts. Journal of Economic Issues, 899–914
  8. ↑ Gontier, N. (2006). Evolutionary Epistemology. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/evo-epis/
  9. ↑ Campbell, D. T. (1960). Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes. Psychological Review, 67(6), 380–400.
  10. ↑ Campbell, D. T. (1990). Epistemological roles for selection theory. Evolution, cognition, and realism: Studies in evolutionary epistemology, 1–19.
  11. ↑ Hodgson, G. M. (2005). Generalizing Darwinism to social evolution: Some early attempts. Journal of Economic Issues, 899–914.
  12. ↑ Gary Cziko (1995) Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution (MIT Press)
  13. 1 2 Stoelhorst, J. W. (n.d.). Universal Darwinism from the bottom up: An evolutionary view of socio-economic behavior and organization. Wolfram Elsner and Hardy Hanappi, Advances in Evolutionary Institutional Economics: Evolutionary Modules, Non-Knowledge, and Strategy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers.
  14. ↑ Bickhard, M. H., & Campbell, D. T. (2003). Variations in variation and selection: The ubiquity of the variation-and-selective-retention ratchet in emergent organizational complexity Foundations of Science, 8(3), 215–282.
  15. ↑ Heylighen, F. (1992). Principles of Systems and Cybernetics: an evolutionary perspective. Cybernetics and Systems' 92. pp. 3–10. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.32.7220 .
  16. ↑ Heylighen, F. (1999). "The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution" (PDF). In Heylighen, F.; Bollen, J.; Riegler, A. (eds.). The Evolution of Complexity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. pp. 17–44.
  17. ↑ Dawkins, R. (1983) Universal Darwinism. In: Evolution from molecules to man, ed. D. S. Bendall. Cambridge University Press.
  18. ↑ Bernstein H, Byerly HC, Hopf FA, Michod RA, Vemulapalli GK. (1983) The Darwinian Dynamic. Quarterly Review of Biology 58, 185–207. JSTOR   2828805
  19. ↑ Plotkin, H. C. (1997). Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge. Harvard University Press.
  20. ↑ Dennett, Daniel C. (2005), Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Touchstone Press, New York. pp. 352–360.
  21. ↑ Oudeyer, P.-Y. and Kaplan, F. (2007) Language Evolution as a Darwinian Process: Computational Studies. Cognitive Processing, 8(1):21–35
  22. ↑ Blume-Kohou, Robin and Zurek, Wojciech. (2006). Quantum Darwinism: Entanglement, branches, and the emergent classicality of redundantly stored quantum information, Journal-ref: Phys. Rev. A 73, 062310 (2006)
  23. ↑ Smolin, Lee (1997). The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford University Press
  24. ↑ Smolin, Lee (2008), Scientific Alternatives to the Anthropic Principle, Contribution to "Universe or Multiverse", ed. by Bernard Carr et al., to be published by Cambridge University Press.
  25. 1 2 Kelley, D. B. (2013). The Origin of Everything via Universal Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Systems in Contention for Existence. Newbury, Ohio: Woodhollow Press. p. 371. ISBN   978-0985462505.
  26. ↑ Schleicher, August. Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language. (Transl. by Alexander V. W. Bikkers) London, J. C. Hotten (1869)
  27. ↑ Shiozawa, Y. 2004 Evolutionary Economics in the 21st Century: A Manifesto, Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review,1(1): 5–47. Shiozawa, Y. 2020 A new framework for analyzing technological change. Journal of Evolutionray Economics 30: 989–1034.
  28. ↑ Baker, D. The Darwinian Algorithm and a possible candidate for a unifying theme of Big History. http://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/10_500_the_darwinian_algorithm_and_a_possible_candidate_for_a_-unifying_theme-_of_big_histo/
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