Universal Darwinism is the idea that Darwinism is a broadly applicable theory - which applies to organic biology, but also applies to culture, development, the brain - and many systems beyond the organic realm.
Darwin's theory of evolution is substrate-neutral. Darwin himself recognized this - and included passages to that effect in "The Descent of Man", saying that:
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
The Wikipedia page on Universal Darwinism gives a long list of fields to which Darwin's theory of evolution has been applied. It ranges from the social sciences through complex adaptive systems to some much more speculative ideas - such as the idea that the visible cosmos itself evolved.
Memetics and cultural evolution represent Universal Darwinism applied to human culture.
Scope
Though Darwinism has historically been largely confined to biology, Universal Darwinism represents a massive expansion of its domain - into the social sciences, ontogeny and beyond: into physics, chemistry and systems theory. Position, velocity, mass, charge and many other physical attributes are all copied with variation and selection.
History
The idea was first expressed in modern times by Donald Campbell. One of the best histories of the idea comes from Henry Plotkin's book "Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge". In the book, Plotkin repurposed the term "Universal Darwinism", assigning it its modern usage. He traces the idea from Darwin, Huxley, Piaget, Campbell and Popper before getting on to the topic of natural selection within the immune system and the nervous system.
Universality
Some (e.g. Geoffrey Hodgson) have questioned the "universality" of Universal Darwinism - saying that life is confined to our planet - and that the term "Generalised Darwinism" would be more appropriate. I think that "Degenerative Darwinism" - which applies Darwin's theory to fractures, ripples, crystals and other commonplace adaptive systems which are not "advanced" enough to exhibit cumulative adaptation - justifies use of the term "universal Darwinism". It does this without recourse to controversial ideas about black holes, quantum physics, or biologically-derived evolving systems, like culture, technology or modern computer systems.
History of the term
Richard Dawkins appears to have coined the term "Universal Darwinism" in 1983 to describe the conjecture that any possible life forms existing outside the solar system would necessarily evolve by Darwinian means.
Henry Plotkin's 1997 book "Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge" had a chapter titled "Universal Darwinism". This redefined the term to refer to broader forms of evolution - specifically evolution within organisms (the immune system and learning) rather than between organisms.
Susan Blackmore, in her 1999 book The Meme Machine, also has a chapter titled "Universal Darwinism". This discusses applying Darwinism to a broad range of phenomena - including human culture.
Incompleteness
"Universal Darwinism" is a very general theory. To make detailed predictions in specific cases, it typically depends on other theories. It is thus like a framework on which other, more specific theories are based. It has 'spaces' for theories of:
Mutation;
Selection criteria;
Recombination;
Development.
These elements are typically treated as pluggable black boxes by the theory - though there are typically constraints on what can be plugged in (for example, a mutation can't be allowed to be any possible change).
Much of the debate over the utility of Universal Darwinism has taken place within economics - one of the first social sciences to take Darwinism seriously. However, economics has proved to be a myopic context in which to criticize the theory, with many critics getting out of their depth and struggling to understand the topic.
Criticism
"Universal Darwinism" is a highly-criticized subject. It hasn't attracted as much heat as cultural evolution, memetics, or evolutionary psychology, but there are still many critics with a lot of different issues. Probably the single most important thing to say about the critics is that they are mistaken. However some of them do highlight genuine issues with the theory.
Probably the single most important criticism is that "Universal Darwinism" is mistaken because copying with variation and selection is not a scientific theory - since it is compatible with all observations and so is irrefutable. Levit, Hossfeld and Witt (2010) present this criticism in more detail. NeoDarwinism avoids this criticism since it claims that mutations are 'random' (in a bizarre technical sense of the word). However in Universal Darwinism, mutations are merely 'blind' (in a bizarre technical sense of the word due to Donald Campbell). This both weaker, harder to explain and more confusing, which leads critics to this objection.
A weaker version of this criticism is that "Universal Darwinism" constrains expectations only weakly - and so isn't very useful. However, applying weak constraints is still better than not applying constraints at all.
Speculative extensions
Some applications of Darwinism are pretty speculative. The idea that the visible universe is an adaptation - by James Gardner and Lee Smolin - is one example of this. These speculative aspects of universal Darwinism should not be used to detract from those that are hard science.
D. B. Kelly has written The Origin of Everything via Universal Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Systems in Contention for Existence. There's an associated web site.
Aldrich , Howard E., Hodgson, Geoffrey M., Hull, David L., Knudsen, Thorbjørn, Mokyr, Joel and Vanberg, Viktor J. (2008) In defence of generalized Darwinism.
Amundson, Ronald (1989) The trials and tribulations of selectionist explanations.In K. Hahlweg & C. A. Hooker (Eds.), Issues in evolutionary epistemology (pp. 413-432). Albany: State University of New York Press. [criticism]
Campbell, Donald T. (1974b) Unjustified variation and selective retention in scientific discovery.In F J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology (pp. 139-161). London: Macmillan.
Campbell, Donald T. (1977) Comment on Robert J. Richard's "The natural selection model of conceptual evolution."Philosophy of Science, 44, 502-507.
Campbell, Donald T. (1988) A general 'selection theory' as implemented in biological evolution and in social belief-transmission-with-modification in science [A commentary on Hull]. Biology and Philosophy, 3, 171-177.
Campbell, Donald T., Lanham, M.D. (1990) Epistemological roles for selection theory.In N. Rescher (Ed.), Evolution, cognition, and realism: Studies in evolutionary epistemology (pp. 1-19). University Press of America.
Kary, K. (1982) Can Darwinian inheritance be extended from biology to epistemology? In P.D. Asquith & T. Nickles (eds.), PSA 1982, Volume 1. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association Press, pp. 356-369.
Wuketits, Franz M. (1984) Evolutionary epistemology: A challenge to science and philosophy. In F. M. Wuketits (Ed.), Concepts and approaches in evolutionary epistemology (pp. 1-29). Dordrecht & Boston: Reidel.
Darwin himself understood that culture evolves - writing in 1871:
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
The passage this quote comes from is of historical interest. Here it is in full:
The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and
the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process,
are curiously parallel. But we can trace the formation of many
words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how
they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds. We find in
distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent,
and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in
which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like
correlated growth. We have in both cases the re-duplication of
parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth. The frequent
presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more
remarkable. The letter m in the word am, means I; so that in the
expression I am, a superfluous and useless rudiment has been retained.
In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments
of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can
be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either
naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters.
Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual
extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once
extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same
language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed
or blended together. We see variability in every tongue, and new
words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the
powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually
become extinct. As Max Muller has well remarked:- "A struggle
for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical
forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms
are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to
their own inherent virtue." To these more important causes of the
survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added;
for there is in the mind of man a strong love for slight changes in
all things. The survival or preservation of certain favoured words
in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
We're in a mass extinction event just now. Languages are going extinct as well as organic creatures. However, what you may not have known is that English words are going extinct too - according to the following study:
While the differences between memes and genes are interesting, I find that too much emphasis on the differences causes people to prematurely reject memetics - and then miss out on all its valuable aspects. So, I'm a little concerned that Razib may be inadvertently contributing to this problem.
Razib pointed out that gradual migration tends to result in the migrants adopting the memes of their new home - while their genes tended to survive the transition much better.
Someone who is sincerely looking for the corresponding area of genetics, should consider the genes in symbionts (parasites or mutualists) - not the genes in the humans. That is because cultural creatures (with memetic heredity) are much more like parasites and mutualists than they are like their human hosts.
So: do gradual human migrants pick up the colds, flus, tics, lice and bed bugs of their new home? Do they adopt the berries, grains and livestock of their new homeland? In some cases you'll find that the answer is "yes".
Also in the cultural case, sometimes the corresponding answer is "no". Consider the "surname" memes - they typically manage to survive the transition intact. Or imagine an inventor - some of their memes may survive and thrive in the new ecosystem - almost as if they had brought across a potent new viral strain.
From this broader perspective, memes and genes turn out not to look so very different. The dissimilarity arose from considering one type of meme and one type of gene. If you are considering memes that spread horizontally between hosts, the appropriate point of comparison is genes that spread horizontally between hosts - e.g. the genes in viruses.
Epidemiology dealls with the spread of health-related phenomena through populations. These could be pathogen-borne illnesses, poisonings, work-related illnesses, or a range of other health-related events.
Many traits that spread are the result of some kind symbiosis. Pathogens spread through populations - but so do mutualists - such as the relationship between humans and various kinds of fruit and vegetable. Humans also have mutualistic relationships with a variety of decorative and medicinal plants.
Other traits that spread through populations are cultural traits. These can usefully be seen as being cultural symbionts. Fads, fashions, and trends spread through populations much like plagues and viruses do. They too spread like epidemics and plagues - and have their own epidemic threshold.
Other types of phenomena spread as well - for example radioactive fallout, sunburn and frostbite.
However, not all of the phenomena that spread are particularly health related. Currently the fields of mutualisms and memetics borrow heavily from the terminology of epidemiology to describe the dynamics of the systems they study. It seems desirable to generalise epidemiology to cover all traits.
So, here we propose generalised epidemiology - the science that studies how traits spread through populations - irrespective of whether the traits are related to health.
This field differs from demography through its focus on change - and through not being confined to humans.
A similar coinage is infodemiology. One paper claims:
Infodemiology can be defined as the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy.
That's a pretty duff definition, but the word could work. Generalised epidemiology is intended to cover infodemiology and epidemiology. However, "infodemiology" may be more of a rival term - and it is a bit of a shame that the first stab at it didn't cover the general case.
It is proposed that use of the term "epidemiology" to refer only to health traits should eventually be deprecated, allowing the term "epidemiology" be reassigned to refer to the concept of generalised epidemiology described here. This proposal is supported by the etymology of the word "epidemiology" - which says that it means, roughly speaking: "what is on the people".
I think there's a need for a collective noun for memes. This is partly because of the way memes sometimes tend to clump together - in conferences and churches for example - or in the minds of the paranoid or obsessed.
The resulting effects are rather like a flock of birds or a school of fish...
Here are some of the more noteworthy proposals so far:
a library of memes
a plague of memes
an epidemic of memes
a colony of memes
a swarm of memes
a pool of memes
a plethora of memes
an infestation of memes
a hash of memes
a copy of memes
a sneeze of memes
a contagiousness of memes
an infectiousness of memes
There's also a proposed collective noun for internet memes:
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler and this is a brief review of this book:
Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution by Stephen Shennan.
This is a book about archaeology. It starts out with a couple of chapters about human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution. Stephen begins by saying that he was originally turned on to the idea of cultural evolution by reading the chapter on memes in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. However, he said that, at the time, he didn't see how to apply the idea of memes to archeaology. He later came across the book "Culture and the Evolutionary Process" by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd - which set the wheels turning in his mind and gave him some clearer ideas about the practical significance of the idea.
Most of this book is about archaeology - and its fairly dense material. Archaeology is not my own area - and so I can't offer a balanced review of much of the content of the book. However, I can comment on the parts of the book that relate to cultural evolution.
I had positive expectations of Stephen's work after listening to him eloquently advocate the value of the meme's eye view at the 2010 "culture evolves" conference. However, there's not much meme's eye view in this 2003 book. Indeed, there isn't much memetics at all. Stephen starts out by saying that he has:
considerable reservations about the role and reality of memes in the strict sense, conceived as specific discrete cultural elements copied from one person to another.
In his chapter about cultural evolution, he says that many authors have doubts about memes. He lists a string of those doubts and then writes:
It appears then that the "meme as replicator" model has considerable problems as the basis for a theory of cultural inheritance. Fortunately, accepting that culture is an inheriance system does not depend on the meme model.
The index of the book lists memes on only separate eight pages. Since the book has the word "memes" in its title, I was disappointed by this sparse and unsympathetic coverage.
For students of the topic, it is obvious that something a lot like what memetics discribes is going on as culture evolves. I think that students of memetics should be trying to get memetics to work - by finding sympathetic interpretations of it that do useful work. Unsypmathetic interpretations that are not useful - such as the one that Stephen seems to have adopted - can surely be binned as not contributing to the main effort.
Stephen appreciates that memes can be deleterious - and that drift and selection apply to them - but there isn't much sign of the symbiosis perspective on memes. At one point Stephen does say:
we do not need to accept the cultural virus or meme ideas to see how the processes of genetic and cultural transmission can lead to different outcomes.
That's a bit negative about symbiosis - but shows that Stephen has at least heard of the concept.
The early chapters on human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution are generally not too bad. The cultural evolution is fairly basic - though a sophisticated theory is probably not needed for most archaeological applications. Archaeology can mostly get by with just diffusion, selection, drift and the basic concepts of phylomemetics.
One other chapter was of some interest to me - the book has a chapter on group selection. Stephen had previously stated that group selection "did not seem to work" - in his chapter on behavioural ecology. However, in the "group selection" chapter he cites Soltis, Skyrms, Bowles and Gintis - and discusses group selection in favourable terms. However, I am inclined to think that much of the work that has been done on human group selection by these authors is problematical - since they don't seem to be properly aware of the concept of cultural kin selection - which explains many of the effects they are attempting to model at the group level by using interactions between close cultural kin. There's a sense in which group selection and kin selection models are equivalent - but because close cultural kin are involved, this is fairly clearly a case where group selection is getting credit for kin selection's moves.
The group selection chapter was mostly involved with an examination of the evidence - and didn't delve into theoretical issues very much.
This book has its moments. However, it is all about archaeology - and people should not buy it expecting to learn very much about memes. Memes essentially get bashed by the author in the book. Memetics is treated more sympathetically elsewhere.
Hi! I'm Tim Tyler and this is a brief review of this book:
Darwin's Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection by Frank Ryan.
The book is about symbiology. My interest in the history of the idea of symbiosis arises because I am interested in a symbiological theory of cultural evolution - namely memetics. Academia was incredibly sluggish in adopting symbiosis in the organic realm. It was almost a hundred years between its discovery and its acceptance. The modern problems with the failure of academia to adopt symbiosis in the cultural realm broadly mirrors the probem it had in adopting symbiosis in the organic realm. If cultural symbiology takes a hundred years to be accepted that might take us up to around 2075. The thought of one of my favourite theories sitting around in limbo for another sixty three years before going mainstream is not much fun to contemplate. So - I'm hoping that - by better understanding the history of symbiosis - I'll be able to find a way to move things along a little.
Frank Ryan's book is quite good. Probably the part I found most interesting was the speculation about how metamorphosis in butterflies could possibly have arisen out of a symbiotic union. I had not previously considered that possibility - and I looked it up on the internet. The most vocal advocate of the idea has been a fellow called Don Williamson, who has written a whole book on the topic. Numerous scientists have poured scorn on Don's idea. Don proposed that a winged insect impregnated a velvet worm - to produce butterflies. That seems to be an unlikely story. However there are plenty of wasps that use caterpillars as incubators. In some cases there's one host insect for each baby wasp (for example that happens with Jewel wasps). It is relatively easy to imagine that such a symbiosis eventually evolves to cut out the stage where the adult has to track down a new host.
Frank Ryan has gone on to write another book titled "The Mystery of Metamorphosis: A Scientific Detective Story" - which is all about this topic - which I might have to read one day - in order to determine whether the idea of metamorphosis being linked to symbiosis has anything to it.
The rest of the book didn't teach me that much. The writing was okay - though not exactly riveting. The book rambled around quite a bit covering The Gaia hypothesis, the origin of life and the origin of sex - and many other topics.
The book does approvingly mention memes - but it doesn't seem to grasp the possibility of them acting as cultural symbionts. It does have a chapter starting with a quote from Richard Dawkins that reads:
But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
That sounds promising - right? I though so too - however, the chapter rambles around the idea that maybe cooperation between humans is a form of symbiosis - and then concludes with the idea that maybe trade is another form of symbiosis - and that's the extent of it. It is great to see some coverage of cultural symbiology. However, this coverage is feeble and misses out most of the topic. Ryan doesn't seem to understand the possibility of cultural creatures existing - and so tries to find ways of considering cultural symbiosis that involve multiple humans. The history of symbiosis will need rewriting once cultural symbiology is more widely understood.
One area where I wanted more information than the book provided was the negative effects of science stumbing along with the wrong theory for decades. Without symbiosis, evolution is less cooperative and more more competitive. One of my concerns is that: people might stumble along with the wrong theory of cultural evolution for a long time - and in the process cause substantial damage to society through promoting competitive variants of politics and economics. Indeed, the damage done by incorrect forms of Darwinism in the past seems to have been substantial. The idea that a Darwinian economy or political system is one dominated by competition has the potential to be especially harmful to society - and this is part of why a symbiotic theory of cultural evolution is such an urgent issue.
My appetite for the topic was not entirely satiated by the book - and I might yet have to read more books on the history of symbiosis, to get a fuller picure of the subject.
Laura is currently at the SantaFe Institute. Her research investigates the evolution of human social organization, focusing on the social norms regulating kinship and marriage. This involves understanding why societies differ with respect to these norms – for example, why some prescribe monogamous marriage, while the majority allow polygyny; and how this variation came about – for example, whether the prevalence of monogamous marriage among European societies is simply an artefact of history, or whether it reflects ecological and/or social determinants.
Videos
Laura Fortunato - The Evolution of Marriage and Kinship Systems
Ara Norenzayan is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His areas of research include evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religious thought and behavior, issues of cultural variability and universality in human psychology, and relations between culture and evolution.
Videos
Darwin and your beliefs - Ara Norenzayan
Memes get explicitly mentioned at 1:12:00 in the above video. Ara says "the meme idea is underdeveloped".
Universal Darwinism is the idea that Darwinism is a broadly applicable theory - which applies to organic biology, but also applies to culture, development, the brain - and many systems beyond the organic realm.
Darwin himself understood that culture evolves - writing in 1871:
We're in a mass extinction event just now. Languages are going extinct as well as organic creatures. However, what you may not have known is that English words are going extinct too - according to the following study:
On his blog, Razib Khan once wrote about 
I think there's a need for a collective noun for memes. This is partly because of the way memes sometimes tend to clump together - in conferences and churches for example - or in the minds of the paranoid or obsessed.
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