BURSTFor the past century and a half, the concept of evolution has primarily been wielded by those describing change of a purely biological nature. But according to ecologist Mark Vellend, this sort of thinking distracts us from the truth: that everything evolves—“giraffes, cell phones, marketplaces”—and we do science and society a disservice by neglecting this fact. At best, says Vellend, such oversight robs us of the opportunity to recognize “the beauty in unity of knowledge.” At worst, it bars us from applying evolutionary lessons that transcend disciplines.
In his new book Everything Evolves, Vellend makes an argument for what he and likeminded scientists have begun to call the “Second Science”—a realm of study that “guides us to an understanding of not only how and why diversity changes over time, but also what the consequences of such diversity might be for the productivity of economies or the stability of ecosystems.” In other words, how evolution impacts anything and everything in our lives.
“The argument for a new synthesis,” writes Vellend, “does not claim that the modern synthesis is incorrect, just that it is incomplete.” Nautilus spoke with Vellend about the First and Second Sciences, why applying evolution to human affairs does not need to lead to Social Darwinism, and a new vision for how we might make our understanding of evolution a bit more complete.
Why did you write this book?
I wanted to take what I call the “Second Science” and communicate it in a way that hopefully people will appreciate. The idea that evolution applies to an amazingly wide range of things seems not to have made it beyond the borders of academia, even though it feels like something that you can teach to high-school kids when they learn about the very basics of evolution. So I thought that one of the things missing from that literature was some sort of written argument laying it out in a way that hopefully could be understood and embraced by people from many different disciplines, or from no discipline at all.
How are the First and Second Sciences different?
The terminology comes from a biologist named Graham Bell, and the term the “Second Science” is a play on the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex. The “first” science is everything that flows directly out of physics, or another way to put it would be everything that traces back to physics in terms of explanation. So chemistry is essentially physics applied to interacting molecules. Much of geology is the physics of rocks and heat and energy. The physiology of organisms is essentially the biochemistry, and therefore essentially the physics of what happens inside an organism. And then the second science is required to understand anything where variable entities are selected based on their characteristics that lead to differential success. That can be organisms, businesses, types of technology, languages, giraffes, cell phones, marketplaces—none of these things can be explained by tracing things back to physics. You require this extra process, and that process is evolution.
What is the value in recognizing the relevance of evolution to fields beyond biology?
One reason is aesthetic. I think there is beauty in unity of knowledge, in this case the idea that a cell and a cell phone both came to be via the same evolutionary process of trial and error. A second reason is a sense of humility in realizing the degree to which trial and error, involving a great many different people, underlie what we think of as our greatest technological or cultural achievements. The cell phone is a great example, tracing its evolution through countless rounds of trial and error and recombination of—microprocessors, touch screens, geographic positioning systems—over many decades. We have a tendency to give all the credit to a handful of people, but that’s just not the way it happened.
Finally, there are practical reasons in terms of lessons learned across disciplines. For example, we might apply lessons from plant and animal breeding to artificial intelligence algorithms, or from models of economies to models of ecosystems. The specific terminology used is not what’s important. Given the widespread association of the word evolution with biology, indeed, as I say in the book, “It would probably be wise to come up with a word different from evolution to more formally debiologize the concept, but I have nothing better to offer at the moment. We can wait and see what evolves.”
I think there is beauty in the idea that a cell and a cell phone both came to be via the same evolutionary process.
What is the Darwinian Distraction?
For a long time, social scientists have resisted the application of evolutionary ideas to human affairs because of what became called Social Darwinism—the idea that it’s only natural for some groups of people to dominate and oppress others. That’s a very objectionable interpretation—a misinterpretation, really, of evolutionary ideas. So one element of the distraction is that the use of evolutionary ideas to explain a broad sweep of things in human culture somehow brings along this baggage. You can advance a generalized evolutionary science without bringing along Social Darwinism.
And the second perhaps more surprising element is just how obsessed biologists and evolutionary scientists get with Darwin very specifically. Darwin really nailed the idea that variation arises, and selection among the different variants can lead to these exquisite adaptations and diversity. But he knew nothing about exactly where that variation came from or how it was inherited, and yet we still give the name neo-Darwinism to the version of evolutionary theory that has all of those details about the variation and the inheritance, which are two of the key ingredients.
You mention in the book that there are certain risks to not teaching evolution in the classroom. What are those risks?
As a scientist, it’s considered a fact that life traces its origin back to one common ancestor, and between that common ancestor and all of the life that we see on Earth, it is the set of evolutionary processes that got us from there to here. There really is no other explanation. There is no other set of processes that can explain that, and so a lot has been written about how keeping this out of schools can essentially rob students of knowledge of our best understanding of how life works and the extent that these evolutionary ideas apply a lot more broadly. We’re depriving them of an understanding of how the technology in their pockets came to be, and the very technology that allows them to live in a home, and their language, and their own culture, and how those things change over time.
You discuss the key components of an evolutionary system, mentioning the commonly accepted variation, inheritance, and differential success, but then you add movement to the list. Why does movement belong there?
Movement isn’t a necessary ingredient. If you imagine a hypothetical world in which there’s one very local place and all of the entities within it are just completely well-mixed and bumping into one another, you can still have an evolutionary system. But once you’re out in the real world, there’s always some sort of structure. Cultures are geographically structured, and even now in the Anthropocene when these cultures are very well connected, there’s still a structure there. Brazil is still Brazil, the United States is still the United States, and they’re very different places. But the amount of movement between them can have a huge impact on how those two cultures evolve.
We know that species are moving from one place to the other, and that can have a huge impact, not only on how biotas and cultures evolve in each of those places, but in the whole ensemble of places in the entire globe. We have new species arising, for example, because movement has carried organisms to places where they face new selective pressures, and they’re cut off from the place they came from. We have global dynamics that are also affected by movement. Especially in the modern world, movement is so important, and its magnitude, the amount of movement of ideas, cultures, people, species from place to place has increased to such a massive extent that we absolutely have to pay attention to it when we think about evolutionary systems.
You propose the creation of a new academic discipline: evolutionary sciences. What would that look like?
Often, as somebody who’s an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I feel like I share more conceptually with people who study economics or sociology or political science. So it seems worth going through the thought exercise of asking, what would happen if there was a faculty of evolutionary science that included people like me? We have this natural science/social science divide which is extremely ubiquitous, at least in North American institutions, and once you have something like that ingrained into a system, it’s actually very difficult to change, because there’s entire funding agencies and institutions that would have to be rethought. But I think that’s well worth pondering, and who knows? Maybe one day some ambitious, daring university will give it a shot and see how it goes.
Before science had a name, it was called natural philosophy. And now I think most would agree that philosophy is a pretty distinct activity from science, even though there’s an entire field of philosophy of science. So absolutely there’s potential for these things. I mean, they will change. 200 years from now, the scientific enterprise will not look like it does today. What it will look like is to be determined. 
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