Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don\u2019t demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how (for better or worse) things happened to turn out.<\/p>\n
Ecologist Mark Vellend\u2019s thesis is that to understand the world, \u201cphysics and evolution are the only two things you need\u201d. Evolution<\/a>, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before. Thus the world can be divided into things that are inescapable and things that are contingent, depending on circumstances. In the terminology he borrows from evolutionary biologist Graham Bell, the study of physical necessity is the \u201cfirst science\u201d; that of historical contingency the second. So, the periodic table of 90 or so natural elements, which are inescapable given the laws of physics, would fall under the first science. Dung beetles and vice presidents, which aren\u2019t, fall under the second.<\/p>\n This \u201csecond science\u201d, Vellend argues, unites disciplines from evolutionary biology to anthropology, history, economics and political science. If we fail to teach children about evolutionary processes, we \u201cdeprive them of understanding the fundamental set of processes that underlie not only life, but also the\u00a0cultures and economies (and education systems) in which they live and work\u201d. In developing this thesis, Everything Evolves draws on examples from technology and product design, microbiology, ecology, linguistics, and more.<\/p>\n When biologists talk of evolution, they tend to mean the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, which incorporates three phenomena \u2013 variation, selection and inheritance. Life generates diversity: some animals, for example, can run faster than others. (Darwin didn\u2019t know how such variation arose; it is now attributed to genetic mutation.) Some of those variants help an animal survive because they\u2019re better adapted to its environment and circumstances. These are the ones that are selected for inheritance \u2013 they\u2019re passed on to the next generation, rather than dying out.<\/p>\n But Vellend advises against a too Darwin-centric view of evolution. For one thing the theory is much more complex than this bullet-point summary. Some organisms survive by sheer luck, not adaptive advantage, creating random drift in traits. And, as Vellend explains, the nuances seem endless. For instance, the \u201cfitness\u201d of some variants may depend on how rare or common they are, as he illustrates by analogy with baby names: a name might be more fit when it\u2019s unusual than when it\u2019s familiar. Fitness is also multi factorial: does a mobile phone perform better in the marketplace by virtue of being smaller, faster, nicer to look at, cheaper? How is one advantage weighed against another?<\/p>\n As these examples show, ideas from evolutionary theory can be applied to social systems and artefacts, from corporations to computers. But this doesn\u2019t mean they too evolve in strictly Darwinian fashion. Other types of evolution are possible: ones that involve an element of planning, rather than random variation, say. What they all have in common is repeated trial and error, with some way of assessing the products and retaining what works. Vellend attempts to paint this larger picture through the metaphor of an \u201cevolutionary soundboard\u201d on which a series of dials controlling factors such as variation, inheritance and differential success can be twiddled. It\u2019s a noble effort at unification \u2013 but as any engineer knows, once you have a complex system governed by many independent factors, the possibility space is vast and the task of predicting (or understanding) outcomes overwhelming. In the end, the message is simply that evolving systems are widespread and massively complicated.<\/p>\n Vellend recognises that he is not the\u00a0first to suggest a distinction between physical determinism and evolutionary contingency. In A World Beyond Physics (2019), for example, complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman argued that \u201cphysics will not tell us whence we come, how arrived, why the human heart exists, nor why I can buy nectarines in Eastsound [an island in the Pacific north-west]\u201d.<\/p>\n But can a description of the physical and social worlds really be\u00a0split so neatly in two? On the one hand, if nature really is lawlike at the fundamental level, doesn\u2019t that mean everything that has\u00a0happened since the big bang, including the evolution of dung beetles, has an inevitability about it? Certainly there seems to be some lawlike predictability to both biological and social evolution. Fluid dynamics makes it likely that many flying things would be winged and swimming things streamlined. Physical principles prevent humans growing 20 ft tall or trees topping about 300 ft. There is a physics that describes traffic jams and networks like the internet or Amazonian ecosystems.<\/p>\n On the other hand, quantum mechanics is probabilistic: we can\u2019t\u00a0say what will happen at the microscopic scale, only what might. It\u2019s\u00a0widely thought that the large-scale structure of the universe carries the imprint of quantum fluctuations \u2013 of chance \u2013 laid down when the cosmos was still around the size of an atom. So\u00a0in a sense there is a contingency to absolutely everything that exists.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Vellend\u2019s proposal for a restructuring of the academic curriculum into the first and second sciences is, then, open to debate. Yet he does a valuable job of reminding us how little fundamental physics explains, or ever will. \u201cEverything,\u201d the zoologist D\u2019Arcy Thompson is said to have once opined, \u201cis the way it is because it got that way.\u201d Vellend\u2019s title might be truer than even he recognises.<\/p>\n