What Is Evolution in Biology?

The traditional answer to‘what is evolution in biology’ is that it involves changes in the transmissible characteristics of living populations over generations.¹ In short, because survival of the fittest and elimination of the weak are both cumulative processes, they can lead to an enormous amount of change over lengthy durations in particular. While unfit individuals are often eliminated, fit individuals typically pass on their favorable hereditarycombinations.² We therefore end up with, in large,a long yet divergent succession of manyhealthy andenduring lineages.Darwinian natural selection, or ordinary survival of the fittest, has thus shaped everything from genes to species via this unending process of both selecting and refining what ultimately works.³

                The modern answer to ‘what is evolution in biology,’ however, is that it involves changes in the transmissible characteristics of systems, as they too perpetuate themselves one generation at a time.⁴In fact, since the work of Alexander Oparin the 1920’s,⁵ scientists have been finding that natural selection operates well beyond the traditional realm of biology.⁶ They are observingits operation in physics, quantum physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and countless other sciences.⁷ It is therefore becoming clear that survival of the fittest, or ‘preservation of the stable,’ ultimately explains the evolution of every last system in nature.⁸

                This is Universal Darwinism, or the theory of universal selection. It holds that preservation of the stable is a universal, evolutionary mechanism that has driven the furthered development of all natural phenomena. It thus explains their origins and their stability as well as their history. Although the terms Universal Darwinism (Richard Dawkins, 1983) and universal selection (Gary Cziko, 1995)⁹ were coined decades ago, it is with the work of naturalist D. B. Kelley (2013) that the true, universal nature of selection has finally been exposed.¹⁰

Because our universe is so highly interactive, its many phenomena interact, collide, and even destroy one another—much like species themselves. Competition is therefore so prevalent among all such systems that they too are refined via survival of the fittest in every regard. After all, the only way to remain stable in a highly interactive cosmos is to remain adaptive, or open to change, in an otherwise-improbable existence.¹¹

                Scientists are therefore finding not only that adaptive systems exist throughout all of nature but that they are shaped via selection.These include complex systems, behavioral systems, dynamical systems, regulatory-feedback systems, and the like. Such adaptive systems are able to maintain their regulatory existence by responding to external stimuli, or the environment itself—again, just like living things.¹²

                Themanycharacteristics of these systemstoo are transmissible, as they are perpetuated from previous cycles—just as biological characteristics are transmitted from previous generations. As shown by physicist John Wheeler, “Everything is information.”¹³All of the many features of a system qualify as additional data about the phenomenon at hand.Even the various properties of particles, atoms, and molecules provide additional information. Thus, genes aren’t the only things that store data in the natural world, as all things carry data about their various properties, structures, and so on.

                So what is evolution in biology? Here too, it involves changes in systems. In other words, the most fundamental units upon which selection operates are systems and their own inherent behavior. At its most rudimentary level, it doesn’t act upon genes, adaptations, or species. It ultimately acts upon stable systematic activity, and even in biology it must be defined accordingly. Without stating it in this manner, scientists are not addressing it at its proper foundations in physics. After all, genetics, adaptations, etc. are themselves systems. For these reasons and many more, this is the most fundamental level at which preservation of the stable ultimately operates.

We are thusable to understand the origin and evolution of all natural phenomena, as we understandthe true, deterministic mechanism that has made them so. If systems are stable, they are selected for; if they are unstable, they are selected against; and these evolutionary processes have taken place among every last phenomenon that has ever been or will be.

~David Goldberg

Learn more at universalselection.com

References
1 "Evolution Resources".(2016) Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
2 Darwin, Charles (1859), TheOrigin of Species, Introduction, p. 2, John Murray.
3 Dawkins, Richard (1976), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press.
4 Kelley, D. B., (2013), The Origin of Phenomena, Ch. 4, p. 44, Woodhollow Press.
5Oparin, Alexander (1938), Origin of Life, Macmillan Company.
6Bickhard, M. H., & Campbell, D. T. (2003), Variations in variation and selection: The ubiquity of the variation-and-selective-retention ratchet in emergent organizational complexity, Abstract,Foundations of Science, 8(3), 215–282.
7Dennett, Daniel (2005), Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Touchstone Press, New York. pp. 352–360.
8 Kelley, D. B., (2013), The Origin of Phenomena, Preface ,p. iv, Woodhollow Press.
9Cziko, Gary (1995), Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution, From Providence through Instruction to Selection, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
10 Kelley, D. B., (2013), The Origin of Phenomena, Woodhollow Press.
12 Kelley, D. B., (2013), The Origin of Phenomena, Woodhollow Press.
13Ford, Kenneth (2010), John Archibald Wheeler: Doer and Visionary. As viewed on http://metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/5491/Default.aspx