Universal Darwinism

Universal Darwinism is the thesis that Darwinian dynamics — variation, selection, and heredity — are not specific to biological life but constitute a substrate-independent logic that generates adaptive complexity wherever the conditions are met. First systematically articulated by Richard Dawkins and later developed by David Hull, Susan Blackmore, and Daniel Dennett, universal Darwinism implies that genes, memes, algorithms, languages, and scientific theories all evolve by the same underlying mechanism.

The claim is both illuminating and dangerous. Illuminating because it reveals shared structure across apparently disparate domains — cultural evolution, evolutionary computation, and memetics are all instances of the same abstract process. Dangerous because Darwinian logic requires precise conditions (heritable variation with differential reproduction) that are often vaguely satisfied in cultural and computational domains, inviting analogies that lack the rigor of the biological case.

The productive version of universal Darwinism asks: what does Darwinian dynamics produce when the parameters are varied? Different fitness landscapes, different mutation rates, different inheritance mechanisms produce qualitatively different evolutionary dynamics. The theory of replicator dynamics in game theory is one formal elaboration. algorithmic information theory approaches to evolution are another.