Generalised genetics

Many people associate genetics with DNA. It often says in the definition of genetics that it is the science of heredity and inheritance in living organisms. However the phenomena of heredity and inheritance are not confined to living organisms. They extend to inorganic systems - raindrops, electrical discharges, propagating cracks, photons hitting dust. See the articles positional inheriance, velocity inheritance and darwinian physics for details about this.

If genetics is the science of heredity and inheritance in living organisms, what is the science of heredity and inheritance in non-living systems living called? It doesn't have a name. Most people don't know that it exists. There are no journals or conferences. It is a dark area of science.

Universal Darwinism requires generalised symbiosis. However, it also requires generalised genetics.

The most famous approach to generalising genetics is the "replicator" concept of Richard Dawkins. However, this concept is misleadingly-named and has caused widespread confusion - as documented in my references below.

Probably the next most famous approach to generalising genetics is the "mneme" concept of Richard Semon. This was conceptually pretty good, but it never took off, and its "mneme" doesn't roll off the tongue.
Other approaches are described in my essay:

• An inherited unit for Universal Darwinism.

The basic problem with genetics is that it is confined to living organisms. Many things in nature are copied with variation and selection that are not conventially considered to be alive. These include crystals, cracks, lighning, drainage patterns, refraction, reemission, turbulent eddies, etc. For more details see my essays:

• Tim Tyler (2012) Degenerative Darwinism
• Tim Tyler (2011) NanoDarwinism
• Tim Tyler (2011) Natural production and natural elimination
• Tim Tyler (2011) Universal Selection

Generalised genetics expands the concept of a science of heredity to all the cases where information is copied in nature. It uses conceptions of gene inspired by G.C. Williams - who described genes as:

In this book I use the term gene to mean 'that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency'

- Williams, 1966, page 241.

The existing concept of genetics could be described as "narrow genetics" - to distinguish it from the generalised version. The principles are pretty - much the same. Eventually we could deprecate the "narrow" version of "genetics" as being redundant - and drop the "generalised" prefix.

References

• Tyler, Tim (2012) An inherited unit for Universal Darwinism.
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Generalised symbiosis.
• Tyler, Tim (2012) Generalised epidemiology.
• Tyler, Tim (2009) Against Replicator Terminology.
• Tyler, Tim (2010) The role of high-fidelity transmission in memetics.
• Tyler, Tim (2011) The claim that evolution doesn't require replicators.
• Tyler, Tim (2010) Replicator rot.