How the Evolution of Everything Shapes the Modern World

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FOr the last and a half century, the concept of evolution was mainly exercised by those describing the purely biological change of nature. But according to the environmentalist Mark Vellend, this kind of thought distracts us from the truth: that everything evolves – “giraffes, mobile phones, markets” – and we do a bad service in science and society by neglecting this fact. At best, says Vellend, such surveillance deprives us of the opportunity to recognize “beauty in the unity of knowledge”. At worst, this prevents us from applying evolutionary lessons that transcend disciplines.

In his new book All evolvesVellend makes an argument for what he and the scientists sharing the part began to call the “second science” – an area of ​​study which “guides us towards an understanding not only in the way and the reason why the diversity changes over time, but also on the consequences of such diversity for the productivity of economies or the stability of ecosystems.” In other words, how evolution affects everything and anything in our lives.

“The argument for a new synthesis”, writes Vellend, “does not pretend that modern synthesis is incorrect, but it is incomplete.” Nautilus Talked with Vellend of the first and second sciences, why the application of evolution to human affairs does not need to lead to social Darwinism, and a new vision of the way in which we could make our understanding of the slightly more complete evolution.

Why did you write this book?

I wanted to take what I call the “second science” and communicate it in a way that people hope will appreciate. The idea that evolution applies to an incredibly wide range of things does not seem to have exceeded the borders of the academic world, even if it looks like something you can teach secondary children when they learn the basics of evolution. So I thought that one of the things that lacked in this literature was a kind of written argument presenting him in a way that, hopefully, could be understood and adopted by people of many different disciplines, or without discipline.

How are the first and second sciences different?

The terminology comes from a biologist named Graham Bell, and the term “second science” is a play on the title of the book by Simone de Beauvoir The second sex. The “first” science is everything that flows directly from physics, or another way of saying it would be all that comes to physics in terms of explanation. Chemistry is therefore essentially physics applied to interaction molecules. A large part of geology is the physics of rocks and heat and energy. The physiology of organisms is essentially biochemistry, and therefore essentially the physics of what is happening within an organism. And then the second science is necessary to understand anything where the variable entities are selected according to their characteristics which lead to differential success. This can be organizations, businesses, types of technology, languages, giraffes, mobile phones, markets – none of these things can explain things to physics. You need this additional process and this process is evolution.

What is the value of recognizing the relevance of evolution for fields beyond biology?

One reason is aesthetics. I think there is beauty in the knowledge unit, in this case the idea that a cell and a mobile phone both have become via the same evolutionary process of tests and errors. A second reason is a sense of humility in carrying out the measure to which tests and errors, involving many different people, underlie what we consider our greatest technological or cultural achievements. The mobile phone is an excellent example, tracing its evolution through countless tests of tests and errors and recombination of – microprocessors, touch screens, geographic positioning systems – in many decades. We tend to give all the credit to a handful of people, but it is simply not the way it happened.

Finally, there are practical reasons in terms of lessons learned between disciplines. For example, we can apply lessons in vegetable and animal reproduction to artificial intelligence algorithms, or saving models to ecosystem models. The specific terminology used is not what is important. Given the generalized association of the word evolution with biology, in fact, as I say in the book, “it would probably be wise to find a word different from the evolution more formally to disuologize the concept, but I have nothing better to offer for the moment. We can wait and see what is evolving. “

I think there is beauty in the idea that a cell and a mobile phone both came via the same evolutionary process.

What is the Darwinian distraction?

For a long time, specialists in the social sciences have resisted the application of evolutionary ideas for human affairs due to what was called social darwinism – the idea that it is natural that certain groups of people dominate and oppress others. It is a very reprehensible interpretation – an erroneous interpretation, really, of evolutionary ideas. Thus, an element of distraction is that the use of evolutionary ideas to explain a wide scanning of things in human culture brings in a way this baggage. You can advance a widespread evolutionary science without bringing social darwinism.

And the second element perhaps more surprising is how obsessed biologists and evolutionary scientists get very specifically with Darwin. Darwin really succeeded in the idea that the variation arises, and the selection between the different variants can lead to these adaptations and these exquisite diversity. But he knew nothing exactly where this variation came from or how it was inherited, and yet we always give the name of neo-Darwinism to the theory of evolution which has all these details on variation and heredity, which are two of the key ingredients.

You mention in the book that there are certain risks so as not to teach the evolution in class. What are these risks?

As a scientist, it is considered a fact that life retraces its origin to a common ancestor, and between this common ancestor and all the life we ​​see on earth, it is the set of evolutionary processes that brought us from there. There is really no other explanation. There is no other processes that can explain this, and therefore many things have been written about how the school care can essentially deprive students of knowledge of our best understanding of the functioning of life and measure where these evolutionary ideas apply much more widely. We deprive them of an understanding of how technology in their pockets has become, and the very technology that allows them to live in a house, their language and their own culture, and how these things change over time.

You discuss the key components of an evolutionary system, mentioning variation, inheritance and differential success commonly accepted, but you then add movement to the list. Why does the movement belong to it?

Movement is not a necessary ingredient. If you imagine a hypothetical world in which there is a very local place and all the entities there are simply well mixed and collide, you can always have an evolutionary system. But once you are in the real world, there is always a kind of structure. The cultures are geographically structured, and even now in anthropocene when these cultures are very well connected, there is always a structure there. Brazil is still in Brazil, the United States is still the United States and these are very different places. But the amount of movement between them can have an enormous impact on the evolution of these two cultures.

We know that species move from one place to another, and this can have a huge impact, not only on the way in which biotas and cultures evolve in each of these places, but in all places in the whole world. We have new species occurring, for example, because the movement has transported organisms to places where they are faced with new selective pressures, and they are cut off from where they come. We have a global dynamic which is also affected by the movement. Especially in the modern world, the movement is so important, and its extent, the amount of movement of ideas, cultures, people, species from one place to another has increased to a massive extent that we must absolutely pay attention to it when we think of evolutionary systems.

You offer the creation of a new academic discipline: evolving sciences. What would it look like?

Often, as an environmentalist and evolutionary biologist, I have the impression of sharing more conceptually with people who study the economy or sociology or political science. So it seems to be worth going through the exercise of thought of asking what would happen if there was a faculty of evolutionary science which understood people like me? We have this fracture in natural sciences / social sciences which is extremely omnipresent, at least in North American institutions, and once you have something like this rooted in a system, it is in fact very difficult to change, because there are entire financing agencies and institutions that should be redesigned. But I think it’s worth thinking about it, and who knows? Maybe an ambitious and daring university will give him a chance and see how it goes.

Before science was a name, it was called natural philosophy. And now, I think most of them would be suitable that philosophy is an activity quite distinct from science, even if there is a whole field of the philosophy of science. So there is absolutely a potential for these things. I mean, they will change. In 200 years, the scientific company will not look like it does today. To which he will look like is being determined.

Image of lead: Axi / Shutterstock

• Nick Hilden

  Published on August 26, 2025

  The writer of arts, sciences and travel Nick Hilden contributes to tastes Washington Post, Scientific American, Esquire, Popular Science, National Geographic, And more. You can follow it on Twitter at @nickhilden or Instagram at @ Nick.hilden.