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Everything Evolves - Mark Vellend ***

The interesting premise of this book is that evolution goes far beyond its biological applications, reaching into everything from economics and language to invention. Strictly the title doesn't accurately fit the starting point we get regularly reiterated in the text, which is that there are basically two sciences. The first science is physics, and the other is evolution. 

The idea here is that physics is based on natural laws, fundamental constants and the like and is effectively unchanging (hence my doubt about the title). This then drives chemistry and biology, which as all physicists will agree (but probably not many chemists and biologists) are just more messy applications of physical principles. The second science, though, Mark Vellend argues is all about change and explains many things that physics-based science can never deal with.

I could really enjoy a book of this kind if it gave us lots of detail about evolution in those application areas like economics and languages which are outside our usual experience. But, unfortunately, we only get passing examples with no depth. Velland is far more concerned with the nature of evolution itself and various implications of it, notably a dip into AI, without covering any depth in those topic like economics I wanted to know more about.

I felt mostly what we were presented with could have been achieved in a long article - at times it seemed very repetitive in going through what evolution entails conceptually over and over without getting onto those interesting bits. My other concern was with the fundamental concept, because I'm not sure evolution is a science.

Calling evolution the second science feels to me like a category error. Evolution is more like a logic statement. Think, for example, of a statement based on logic. If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then logically we can discover that A is bigger than C. I would not describe this as science: it's just a tool that can be used in science. Similarly, evolution is the logical statement that if there is variation in entities, plus a degree of inheritance of characteristics and success based on those characteristics, then the set of those entities will change to succeed more. Evolution is hugely powerful and important, but in the end is trivial logic.

I struggled, then, to get on with this book. I wholeheartedly agree that evolution applies to much more than biology, but wanted a very different take on the application of it and would have liked a less grandiose conception of what evolution is.

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