Everything Evolves - by Mark Vellend (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligence

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.

Review Quotes

"[Vellend provides] a novel approach that details how evolutionary concepts apply to a range of subject areas. This is a philosophical work crafted for the lay reader. A really understandable narrative style, combined with a few graphical illustrations, achieves this goal."---S. R. Fegley, Choice

"A New Yorker Best Book of the Year"

"[Vellend] does a valuable job of reminding us how little fundamental physics explains, or ever will."---Philip Ball, The Guardian

"Ambitious. . . . Here, biological evolution is merely one instance of a more fundamental process that can be seen in any system in which 'new variants are produced, inherited, and moved around' and only some variants proliferate. Stepping away from living things, Vellend finds this dynamic at work in the development of violins and typewriters, in the technologies undergirding ChatGPT, and in the spread of cultural values like individualism."-- "The New Yorker"

"Vellend is skilled at explaining science to the nonspecialist. [This book] is a fascinating primer on evolution's wide reach."-- "Publishers Weekly"

"Vellend delivers ingenious explanations of how evolution gave us not only today's flora and fauna but governments, legal systems, languages, machines, and religion."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

About the Author

Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Université de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Theory of Ecological Communities (Princeton).