Universal Darwinism is the idea that mechanisms of variation, selection, and heredity can be applied to many other fields, including knowledge (the "evolutionary epistemology" of Karl Popper and Donald Campbell), science, linguistics, economics, sociology, and computer science, perhaps to evolution of the universe itself. Things that have been postulated to undergo variation and selection, and thus adaptation, are genes, ideas (which Richard Dawkins called memes in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene), theories, technologies, neurons and their network connections, words, computer programs, firms, antibodies, institutions, law and judicial systems, quantum states (Wojciech Zurek's Quantum Darwinism) and even whole universes.

This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape) for the ones that are best adapted.

• Variation of a given form or template. This is considered to be blind or random, in biology it happens typically by mutation or recombination.
• Selection of the fittest variants, i.e. those that are best suited to survive and reproduce in their given environment. The unfit variants are eliminated.
• Heredity or retention, meaning that the features of the fit variants are retained and passed on, in the offspring of the next generation

The first two steps involve

1. the generation of indeterministic alternative possibilities
2. the adequately determined choice or selection of one actual possibility.

Examples include

1. The two-step process of biological evolution, chance variations or mutations in the genetic code followed by natural selection of those with greater reproductive success.
2. The two-stage model of freedom of the human will, first random alternative possibilities followed by an adequately determined practical or moral choice to make one actual.
3. Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information also involves these two steps or stages (the Shannon principle). The amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages.

If there is only one possible message, like the determinist's one possible future, no new information is communicated. If there is only one possible future, the future and the entire past have been completely determined from time zero, and the information in the universe would be a conserved constant, as many physicists, and some world religions, mistakenly believe. Quantum Darwinism is the application of Darwinian evolutionary steps to quantum systems that evolve to classical systems under Wojciech Zurek's concepts of environmental decoherence, einselection, and pointer states.

Quantum Darwinism, Nature Physics, vol. 5, pp. 181-188 (2009)

Evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena preceded Darwin, but it did not have the concept of natural selection. Darwin himself, together with subsequent 19th-century thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and William James , were quick to apply the idea of selection to other domains, such as language, psychology, society, and culture (James notably to free will). This evolutionary tradition was essentially banned from the social sciences in the beginning of the 20th century, in part because of the bad reputation of Social Darwinism, an attempt to use Darwinism to justify social inequality.

The term "Universal Darwinism" appeared as the title of a 1983 article by Richard Dawkins. Since that time it has been widened to include the evolution of the universe, especially by the work of John O. Campbell, based on the work of Lee Smolin.

The Evo Devo Universe is a community of scholars extending Universal Darwinism to the entire universe. They say...

The Darwinian paradigm has been successfully applied to numerous fields outside of biology: including the social and behavioral sciences and most recently to the physical sciences. Longstanding concepts in physics and information theory, including the free energy principle and Bayesian inference, are now being used to model how information becomes knowledge in a great variety of adaptive systems, including quantum, molecular, cellular, neural, cultural, and technological systems, and even to contemplate our universe itself as an autopoietic (evo-devo) learning system. Such autopoietic, model-centric, and selectionist approaches promise a conceptual unification of many branches of science.

But the extension to the abiotic universe cannot add any ultimate meaning or purpose because it contains no intelligent agents. The only known (and knowing) agents in the universe are in the Earth's biosphere.

To be sure, the abiotic universe contains good in the free energy (negative entropy) that drives the growth of order in complex adaptive systems and evil in entropy, which Norbert Wiener called "the devil incarnate."

And note that the abiotic universe also contains meaningful information, but without a living intelligent agent, that information cannot be experienced. This is similar to AI large language models, which contain vast amounts of information, but they don't "know," i.e. experience, or "feel" anything. They lack the moral responsibility.

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