Everything Evolves by Mark Vellend review – can Darwin explain JD Vance? | Science and nature books

NObody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but there again, no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics do not require them; They have all evolved, expressions of how (for the best or the best) things have gone.

The thesis of the ecologist Mark Vellend is that to understand the world, “physics and evolution are the only two things you need”. The evolution here refers in the most general sense of the results which depend on what happened before. Thus, the world can be divided into things that are essential and contingent things, depending on the circumstances. In terminology, he borrows from the evolutionary biologist Graham Bell, the study of physical necessity is the “first science”; that of historical contingency the second. Thus, the periodic table of 90 natural elements, which are essential given the laws of physics, would be the first science. The beetles and vice-presidents, which are not, fall under the second.

This “second science”, maintains Vellend, unites the disciplines of evolutionary biology to anthropology, history, economics and political science. If we cannot teach children the evolutionary processes, “we should” agree to understand the fundamental whole of processes that underlie not only life, but also cultures and economies (and education systems) in which they live and work “. By developing this thesis, It is based on examples of technology and product design, microbiology, ecology, linguistics, etc.

When biologists speak of evolution, they tend to signify the neo -Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, which integrates three phenomena – variation, selection and heritage. Life generates diversity: some animals, for example, can work faster than others. (Darwin did not know how such a variation was born; it is now attributed to genetic mutation.) Some of these variants help an animal to survive because they are better suited to its environment and its circumstances. These are the ones who are selected for the inheritance – they are transmitted to the next generation, rather than getting off.

But Vellend advises a vision of evolution too focused on Darwin. On the one hand, theory is much more complex than this summary of the chip. Some organizations survive pure chance, not an adaptive advantage, creating a random drift in the lines. And, as Vellend explains, the nuances seem endless. For example, the “fitness” of certain variants can depend on their rarity or their level, as it illustrates by analogy with baby’s names: a name can be more fit when it is unusual than when it is familiar. Fitness is also multi-factor: Does a mobile phone work better on the market due to being smaller, faster, more pleasant to look at, cheaper? How is an advantage weighed against another?

As these examples show, the ideas of evolutionary theory can be applied to social systems and artifacts, from companies to computers. But that does not mean that they also evolve in a strictly Darwinian way. Other types of evolution are possible: those that involve a planning element, rather than random variation, for example. What they all have in common are repeated tests and errors, with a way to assess the products and keep what works. Vellend tries to paint this greater image through the metaphor of an “evolutionary harmony table” on which a series of dials controlling factors such as variation, inheritance and differential success can be turbid. It is a noble effort of unification – but as any engineer knows, once you have a complex system governed by many independent factors, the space of possibility is vast and the task of predicting (or understanding) the overwhelming results. In the end, the message is simply that evolution systems are widespread and massively complicated.

Vellend recognizes that he is not the first to suggest a distinction between physical determinism and evolutionary contingency. In a World Beyond Physics (2019), for example, the theorist of complexity Stuart Kauffman argued that “physics will not tell us, where we come from, how was the human heart, or why I can buy nectarines in Eastsound [an island in the Pacific north-west]».

But can a description of the physical and social worlds really be divided so well in two? On the one hand, if nature is really legal at the fundamental level, does that not mean everything that has happened since Big Bang, including the evolution of beetles, has an inevitability on this subject? There is certainly a certain legislative predictability to biological and social evolution. The dynamics of fluids make it likely that many flying things would be winged and that things were swimming. Physical principles prevent humans from growing 20 feet high or trees exceeding about 300 feet. There is a physics that describes traffic jams and networks like the Internet or Amazonian ecosystems.

On the other hand, quantum mechanics is probabilistic: we cannot say what will occur at the microscopic scale, only what could be able. It is largely believed that the large -scale structure of the universe bears the imprint of quantum fluctuations – chance – established when the cosmos was always around the size of an atom. So, in a sense, there is an absolutely everything that exists.

Vellend’s proposal for a restructuring of the school program in the first and second sciences is therefore open to the debate. However, he does a precious job to remind us how much physics explains little, or never. “Everything”, the zoologist of Arcy Thompson would have once suspected: “is the way it is because she obtained this way.” The title of Vellend could be more true than even he recognizes it.