Universal Darwinism (also known as generalized Darwinism or universal selection theory [1]) refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. The idea is to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can be applied to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics.
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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 one 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.
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 inheritance 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), neurons and their connections, words, computer programs, firms, antibodies, institutions, quantum states and even whole universes[2].
Conceptually, "evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena" preceded Darwin,[3] 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.[4] 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.
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.[5] In this, he was inspired by William Ross Ashby's view of self-organization and intelligence as fundamental processes of selection.[6] 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"[7] or "universal selectionism"[8] by his disciples Gary Cziko,[9][10] Mark Bickhard,[11] and Francis Heylighen.[12][13]
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.[14] Henry Plotkin in his 1997 book[15] 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.[16][17]
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.[18] Researchers have postulated Darwinian processes as operating at the foundations of physics, cosmology and chemistry via the theories of Quantum Darwinism[19] and cosmological natural selection.[20][21] 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.
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).