How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligence
Everything Evolves reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving its own solutions to thorny problems.
Taking readers on an astonishing journey, Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems. Vellend shows how this Second Science unifies biology and culture and how evolution gives rise to everything from viruses and giraffes to nation-states, technology, and us. He discusses how the idea of evolution had precedents in areas such as language and economics long before it was made famous by Darwin, and how only by freeing ourselves of the notion that the study of evolution must start with biology can we appreciate the true breadth of evolutionary processes.
A sweeping tour of the natural and social sciences, Everything Evolves is an essential introduction to one of the two key pillars to the scientific enterprise and an indispensable guide to understanding some of the most difficult challenges of the Anthropocene. Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Université de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Theory of Ecological Communities (Princeton). "Mark Vellend argues that it is a quirk of history that evolution came to be associated most closely with biology. 'It could easily have been linguistics or history.' This is a profound and significant insight. Science needs to recognize the shared features of the many things in the world that develop through path-dependent trial and error, rather than according to fixed laws, from languages to policies to technology to ecosystems. This is a mind-changing and eye-opening book."-Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything
"In Everything Evolves, Mark Vellend advances a bold argument: we need to go beyond Darwin-and must even overcome the 'Darwinian distraction'-if we want to build a new unified science of evolution."-Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
"In lucid and accessible prose, Vellend dares to ask readers to rethink evolution as a general theory of change. It's an especially urgent provocation in our current era of rapid, disorienting disruptions."-Sonia Shah, science journalist and author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
"Vellend describes a broad conception of evolution as a Second Science by constructing an evolutionary soundboard, an analogy that should go viral, with dials for genetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation, horizontal and vertical inheritance, and multiple types of selection. The writing and examples couldn't be CRISPR."-Scott E. Page, John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan
"This is a beautifully written, engaging, and thought-provoking book. A joy to read!"-Troy Day, coauthor of Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution "A New Yorker Best Book of the Year" "Vellend delivers ingenious explanations of how evolution gave us not only today's flora and fauna but governments, legal systems, languages, machines, and religion." "Vellend is skilled at explaining science to the nonspecialist. [This book] is a fascinating primer on evolution's wide reach." "Ambitious. . . . Here, biological evolution is merely one instance of a more fundamental process that can be seen in any system in which 'new variants are produced, inherited, and moved around' and only some variants proliferate. Stepping away from living thin
