Everything Evolves
by Mark Vellend (Princeton)
Nonfiction
In this ambitious book, Vellend, a biologist, attempts to establish a “generalized evolutionary theory” to stand alongside physics as a crucial paradigm for understanding “how everything came to be.” 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.
From The New Yorker
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