---
title: "Universal Darwinism"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Darwinism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:09.761567+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Universal Darwinism is a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, linguistics, economics, culture, medicine, computer science, and physics.
Examples of patterns that have been postulated to undergo variation and selection, and thus adaptation, are genes, ideas (memes), theories, technologies, neurons and their connections, words, computer programs, firms, antibodies, institutions, law and judicial systems, quantum states and even whole universes.

== History and development ==
Conceptually, "evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena" preceded Darwin, but was still lacking the concept of natural selection.
Starting in the 1950s, Donald T. Campbell was one of  the first and most influential authors to revive the tradition, and to formulate a generalized Darwinian algorithm directly applicable to phenomena outside of biology. In this, he was inspired by William Ross Ashby's view of self-organization and intelligence as fundamental processes of selection. His aim was to explain the development of science and other forms of knowledge by focusing on the variation and selection of ideas and theories, thus laying the basis for the domain of evolutionary epistemology. In the 1990s, Campbell's formulation of the mechanism of "blind-variation-and-selective-retention" (BVSR) was further developed and extended to other domains under the labels of "universal selection theory" or "universal selectionism" by his disciples Gary Cziko, Mark Bickhard, and Francis Heylighen.
Richard Dawkins may have first coined the term "universal Darwinism" in 1983 to describe his conjecture that any possible life forms existing outside the Solar System would evolve by natural selection just as they do on Earth. This conjecture was also presented in 1983 in a paper entitled “The Darwinian Dynamic” that dealt with the evolution of order in living systems and certain nonliving physical systems.  It was suggested “that ‘life’, wherever it might exist in the universe, evolves according to the same dynamical law” termed the Darwinian dynamic.  Henry Plotkin in his 1997 book on Darwin machines makes the link between universal Darwinism and Campbell's evolutionary epistemology. 
The philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett, in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, developed the idea of a Darwinian process, involving variation, selection and retention, as a generic algorithm that is substrate-neutral and could be applied to many fields of knowledge outside of biology. He described the idea of natural selection as a "universal acid" that cannot be contained in any vessel, as it seeps through the walls and spreads ever further, touching and transforming ever more domains. He notes in particular the field of memetics in the social sciences.
In agreement with Dennett's prediction, over the past decades the Darwinian perspective has spread ever more widely, in particular across the social sciences as the foundation for numerous schools of study including memetics, evolutionary economics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, neural Darwinism, and evolutionary linguistics. Researchers have postulated Darwinian processes as operating at the foundations of physics, cosmology and chemistry via the theories of quantum Darwinism, observation selection effects and cosmological natural selection. 
Author D. B. Kelley has formulated one of the most all-encompassing approaches to universal Darwinism. In his 2013 book The Origin of Everything, he holds that natural selection involves not the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, as shown by Darwin, but the preservation of favored systems in contention for existence. The fundamental mechanism behind all such stability and evolution is therefore what Kelley calls "survival of the fittest systems." Because all systems are cyclical, the Darwinian processes of iteration, variation and selection are operative not only among species but among all natural phenomena both large-scale and small. Kelley thus maintains that, since the Big Bang especially, the universe has evolved from a highly chaotic state to one that is now highly ordered with many stable phenomena, naturally selected.

=== Gene-based Darwinian extensions ===
Evolutionary psychology assumes that our emotions, preferences and cognitive mechanisms are the product of natural selection
Evolutionary educational psychology applies evolutionary psychology to education
Evolutionary developmental psychology applies evolutionary psychology to cognitive development
Darwinian Happiness applies evolutionary psychology to understand the optimal conditions for human well-being
Darwinian literary studies tries to understand the characters and plots of narrative on the basis of evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary aesthetics applies evolutionary psychology to explain our sense of beauty, especially for landscapes and human bodies
Evolutionary musicology applies evolutionary aesthetics to music
Evolutionary anthropology studies the evolution of human beings
Sociobiology proposes that social systems in animals and humans are the product of Darwinian biological evolution
Human behavioral ecology investigates how human behavior has become adapted to its environment via variation and selection
Evolutionary medicine investigates the origin of diseases by looking at the evolution both of the human body and of its parasites
Paleolithic diet proposes that the most healthy nutrition is the one to which our hunter-gatherer ancestors have adapted over millions of years
Paleolithic lifestyle generalizes the Paleolithic diet to include exercise, behavior and exposure to the environment
Molecular evolution studies evolution at the level of DNA, RNA and proteins
Biosocial criminology studies crime using several different approaches that include genetics and evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary linguistics studies the evolution of language, biologically as well as culturally