Universal Evolution: Evolution Everywhere All at Once

In my previous post, I outlined how we can understand morality through evolutionary processes. The term “evolution” covers many meanings, some of them more helpful than others.

In this post I will outline a brief history of our idea of evolution, the mis-steps taken, and why we should re-base this idea to better understand ourselves and the world around us.

In the Beginning

Humans have long-dwelled on how they (and the world they live) in have come to be. Cultures of all kinds carry creation myths — attempts to reach into the darkness of history and ignorance and come back with some explanation that proves useful to their situation.

In even the earliest writings we have discovered, we find glimpses of modernity.

We can see that the ancients in Greece and India understood that nature was built up from smaller pieces (though it has proved the chemical elements are far more numerous than the earth, water, air, fire and aether they used).

Similarly, the idea that life emerged from an interaction of lower elements, which developed over time, under forces of nature, and eventually led to the emergence of humans, is present in texts from well over 2000 years ago. In De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), Lucretius crystallised the basic idea in his poetry:

Nature she changeth all, compelleth all, to transformation…
And in the ages after monsters died,
Perforce there perished many a stock, unable
By propagation to forge a progeny.
For whatsoever creatures thou beholdest
Breathing the breath of life, the same have been
Even from their earliest age preserved alive
By cunning, or by valour, or at least
By speed of foot or wing.

The modern era has brought scientific backing to this concept, building up from Darwin’s natural selection and sexual selection theories for evolutionary biology.

Lucretius’s work spies evolution beyond the merely biological, however, and sites the beginnings of this force in the cosmic realm:

In that long-ago
The wheel of the sun could nowhere be discerned
Flying far up with its abounding blaze,
Nor constellations of the mighty world,
Nor ocean, nor heaven, nor even earth nor air.
Nor aught of things like unto things of ours
Could then be seen — but only some strange storm
And a prodigious hurly-burly mass
Compounded of all kinds of primal germs,
Whose battling discords in disorder kept
Interstices, and paths, coherencies,
And weights, and blows, encounterings, and motions,
Because, by reason of their forms unlike
And varied shapes, they could not all thuswise
Remain conjoined nor harmoniously
Have interplay of movements.

This view of the evolution of the universe received a more scientific treatment by Astrophysicist Eric Chaisson in 𝐶𝑜𝑠𝑚𝑖𝑐 𝐸𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 and Chemist Robert JP Williams in his essay A system’s view of the evolution of life, helping us understand evolution as a process of physics rather than just living biology.

Further 20th century developments brought more scientific evolutionary principles to the study of cultural matters, with evolutionary linguistics tracing the development of languages, and Richard Dawkins’s memetics describing information and culture as artefacts subject to evolutionary pressures.

Biology: the evolutionary dead end

The application of modern evolutionary principles to fields other than biology has been fraught with mistake and error. Much of this has stemmed from the belief that the principles of biological evolution are the foundational ones which can be applied to other areas:

• Early 19th and 20th century scientists like John Butler Burke ran with evolutionary biology and created theories that suggested atoms were like animals, each with unique properties like genetics. (Something we still have zero evidence for.)
• In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, American philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote in 1995 that Darwinist natural selection was a universal corrosive force that would leak out from biology and provide revelations in all other fields of knowledge.
• The field of memetics similarly leaned hard into the biological gene framework, with Dawkins declaring Universal Darwinism in 1983, with natural selection as the driver. Dawkins saw memes as cultural units in competition for survival, even going as far to describe ideas as “mind viruses”.

These arguments hit fundamental flaws as the tenets of biological evolution and natural selection are not the same for other major fields of investigation, such as atoms or culture.

These tenets of evolution are defined by Universal Darwinist John Campbell as follows:

1. Replication of system
2. Inheritance of some characteristics that have variation amongst the offspring
3. Differential survival of the offspring according to which variable characteristics they possess

John Butler Burke’s early error was to think atoms had the same variation in characteristics as the higher biological forms that they construct, while Dawkins’ and Campbell’s error was to think the evolutionary process of memes would adhere to the evolutionary rules of the lower biological forms in which they exist.

The problem is not that evolution is an idea only relevant to the biological sphere, it’s just that the idea of evolution itself must evolve to become more generalised so it can more accurately describe evolution in the non-biological spheres.

The evolution of evolution

In The Origin of Phenomena, D.B. Kelley provides a framework for a more generalised view, establishing evolutionary principles in numerous fields, with examples from the quantum level up to the cosmological.

Kelley’s redefinition adapts “survival of the fittest” to a systems-based “preservation of the stable” that is inherent within universal physics and takes place through physical contention (i.e. the interaction of systems within the dimensions they exist), competition and cooperation. The implication is that evolution is everywhere, all at once, from the highest system of our universe to the lowest systems at the quantum level.

In this view, we can even interpret processes such as chemical transitions between the atomic elements (nuclear transmutation), and the dominance of the hydrogen atom in our universe, as part of an evolutionary process at the atomic level which sees the most stable forms persist according to the environment in which they exist.

Kelley’s “preservation of the stable” raises a question on what we exactly mean by the term “evolution”, however.

From Lucretius to present day thought, the word has encompassed three linked but distinct processes. We can tease out the distinction in English by comparing the common dictionary definitions of the term “evolution” (change over time) with its supposed antonym “devolution” (degeneration over time or passing of power to a lower level).

• One idea (“change over time”) can essentially be linked to causality and determinism — the way in which the history of things has come to be, and future of things will come to pass.
• A second idea (“degeneration”) speaks to a more generalised subjective sense of these changes having a good quality (evolution) or bad quality (devolution).
• In the third idea (“passing down of power”), we introduce the idea of levels of complexity, most often used to describe central government empowering local government.

The formal scientific concept that biological complexity will always increase over time (orthogenesis) has been long debunked, yet the subjective qualities implicit in the word “evolution” (good/bad/complex/primitive, highly aligned with notions of “progress”) has remained dominant in common thought, and this has often clouded scientific thought too.

The persistence with using terms such as “competition” and “selection” in evolutionary frameworks is detrimental to our understanding. These terms add qualities of individual supremacy and agency, which are not particularly useful or observable at all levels of complexity and deny more holistic perspectives.

The terms “strong” and “weak” are frequently used too. This encourages conflict-based individualistic thinking rather than the interdependent systems thinking we require. Consider the example of the Higgs Boson, which could be designated as a weak system given it lasts less than a trillionth of a billionth of a second before being broken up by the environmental pressure, yet this boson is an essential system without which all the systems we know in the universe would collapse.

An improved definition of universal evolution would be useful, which does not conflate causality and complexity, nor add value judgements or biological hangovers.

Universal evolution: a definition

Evolution is the mechanism through which all things occur — causality. Through the fundamental rule of preservation of the stable, systems are reconfigured over time to the most stable form within a given environment.

Evolution occurs at the quantum level to the highest level (with the universe being the highest we can observe). Every physical form is its own system which is subject to an evolutionary process.

The evolutionary environments within the universe are nested, with the universe serving as the highest environment for all other systems. Within each system are sub-systems which adapt to maintain stability within that system, according to the pressures present in it.

When a system is in contention with another system, all systems involved will do one of three things in order to maintain stability:

1. reconfigure within their current order of complexity¹
2. increase to a higher order of complexity
3. decrease to a lower order of complexity

The precise mechanisms of evolution within a system are an emergent set of laws that arise from the qualities and complexity of the system, but each system is still dependent upon the laws of the higher systems it is nested in.

A more useful evolution

The above definition of Universal Evolution is intended as a framework to observe evolution as a singular, yet multi-faceted and multi-layered process in the universe. It can be applied at the universal level and the quantum level, as well as at the key biological and cultural levels in which we operate.

In my previous post on Cosmic Kingism, I outlined a worldview and morality based within an evolutionary framework. Improving our understanding of causality, stability, and complexity which emerge from the evolutionary process is essential to delivering our own species’ evolutionary goal of thriving and persisting.

There is a moral aspect to improving our evolutionary knowledge. Increased knowledge of evolution at each level of complexity gives us additional evolutionary senses.

With this we can identify more than just the immediate threats and potential benefits to our individual systems (the limit of evolutionary senses found in most other living things), but we can also better identify these things in higher systems too, such as the cultural, community and population levels, the global system level, and also threats to our solar system environment and beyond.

In order to deliver on our values of a better, more stable existence for all, we need to cast off the unscientific baggage stuck in the language of evolutionary thought.

We should consign the idea of “survival of the fittest” to the history books. It is neither scientifically accurate, nor socially useful, given its capacity to support destructive supremacism.

Seeing universal evolution as a series of interdependent yet unique systems, where nothing is created or destroyed but merely reconfigured, is the view best supported by our scientific observations and most accurate to our language.

To return to Martin Luther King Jr: “We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality”.

Footnotes

[1] Per Lee Cronin’s assembly theory, the order of complexity of a system can be measured by how much time it embodies — i.e. the minimum number of steps required to reach the current state. With this approach, complexity can be successfully quantified in scientific terms. This idea is less practical at scale, thus families of complexity based on form can be used for practical reasons to mentally group levels of complexity together (e.g. sub-atomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, and also organism, gene, meme, astronomical object, galaxy, universe).