Universal Darwinism
Universal Darwinism is the idea that mechanisms of variation, selection, and heredity can be applied to many other fields, including
knowledge, science, linguistics, economics, sociology, and computer science, perhaps to evolution of the universe itself. Things 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.
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.
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Variation of a given form or template. This is considered to be blind or random, in biology it happens typically by mutation or recombination.
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Selection of the fittest variants, i.e. those that are best suited to survive and reproduce in their given environment. The unfit variants are eliminated.
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Heredity or retention, meaning that the features of the fit variants are retained and passed on, in the offspring of the next generation
The first two steps involve
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the generation of indeterministic alternative possibilities
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the adequately determined choice or selection of one actual possibility.
Examples include
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The two-step process of biological evolution, chance variations or mutations in the genetic code followed by natural selection of those with greater reproductive success.
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The two-stage model of freedom of the human will, first random alternative possibilities followed by an adequately determined practical or moral choice to make one actual.
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Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information also involves these two steps or stages (the Shannon principle). The amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages.
If there is only one possible message, like the determinist's one possible future, no new information is communicated. If there is only one possible future, the future and the entire past have been completely
determined from time zero, and the information in the universe would be a conserved constant, as many physicists, and some world religions, mistakenly believe.
Evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena" preceded Darwin, but did not have the concept of natural selection. Darwin himself, together with subsequent 19th-century thinkers such as
Herbert Spencer and William James, was quick to apply the idea of selection to other domains, such as language, psychology, society, and culture. This evolutionary tradition was essentially 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.
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