Why evolutionary theory should be applied to peacocks, politics, iPhones and quite a lot in between
obody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don’t demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how things happened to turn out.
This “second science”, Vellend argues, unites disciplines from evolutionary biology to anthropology, history, economics and political science. If we fail to teach children about evolutionary processes, we “deprive them of understanding the fundamental set of processes that underlie not only life, but also the cultures and economies in which they live and work”. In developing this thesis,
When biologists talk of evolution, they tend to mean the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, which incorporates three phenomena – variation, selection and inheritance. Life generates diversity: some animals, for example, can run faster than others. Some of those variants help an animal survive because they’re better adapted to its environment and circumstances.
As these examples show, ideas from evolutionary theory can be applied to social systems and artefacts, from corporations to computers. But this doesn’t mean they too evolve in strictly Darwinian fashion. Other types of evolution are possible: ones that involve an element of planning, rather than random variation, say. What they all have in common is repeated trial and error, with some way of assessing the products and retaining what works.
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