Everything Evolves reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving its own solutions to thorny problems.
Taking readers on an astonishing journey, Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems. Vellend shows how this Second Science unifies biology and culture and how evolution gives rise to everything from viruses and giraffes to nation-states, technology, and us. He discusses how the idea of evolution had precedents in areas such as language and economics long before it was made famous by Darwin, and how only by freeing ourselves of the notion that the study of evolution must start with biology can we appreciate the true breadth of evolutionary processes.
A sweeping tour of the natural and social sciences, Everything Evolves is an essential introduction to one of the two key pillars to the scientific enterprise and an indispensable guide to understanding some of the most difficult challenges of the Anthropocene.
Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Universit茅 de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Theory of Ecological Communities (91桃色).
"An imaginative and plausible study."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“Mark Vellend argues that it is a quirk of history that evolution came to be associated most closely with biology. ‘It could easily have been linguistics or history.’ This is a profound and significant insight. Science needs to recognize the shared features of the many things in the world that develop through path-dependent trial and error, rather than according to fixed laws, from languages to policies to technology to ecosystems. This is a mind-changing and eye-opening book.”—Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything
“In Everything Evolves, Mark Vellend advances a bold argument: we need to go beyond Darwin—and must even overcome the ‘Darwinian distraction’—if we want to build a new unified science of evolution.”—Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
“In lucid and accessible prose, Vellend dares to ask readers to rethink evolution as a general theory of change. It’s an especially urgent provocation in our current era of rapid, disorienting disruptions.”—Sonia Shah, science journalist and author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
“Vellend describes a broad conception of evolution as a Second Science by constructing an evolutionary soundboard, an analogy that should go viral, with dials for genetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation, horizontal and vertical inheritance, and multiple types of selection. The writing and examples couldn’t be CRISPR.”—Scott E. Page, John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan
“This is a beautifully written, engaging, and thought-provoking book. A joy to read!”—Troy Day, coauthor of Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution
This publication generally has been produced to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level AA but has not been checked for language shifts. It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to people with print disabilities. This book contains various accessibility features including alternative text for images, a table of contents, a page list, landmarks, a logical reading order, structural navigation, an index, and semantic structure. Where applicable, there are backlinks to the table of contents.
Accessibility Features
-
WCAG level AA
-
Table of contents navigation
-
Single logical reading order
-
Short alternative textual descriptions
-
Print-equivalent page numbering
-
Landmark navigation
-
Index navigation
-
ARIA roles provided
-
No known hazards or warnings
