Universal Darwinism

Universal Darwinism is Richard Dawkins’s most radical generalization: the claim that Darwinism is substrate-neutral, that evolution is not a fact about carbon and biology but a logical consequence of copying, variation, and differential survival in any medium. Wherever information is copied with imperfect fidelity, where copies vary, and where some variants are more likely to be copied again than others, Darwinian dynamics will emerge—inevitably, automatically, with no designer and no purpose in the process. Dawkins demonstrated this first with the gene, then with the meme, and argued that the logic extends without limit to any replicating system. The digital medium that now hosts artificial intelligence is the most powerful copying substrate in the history of the planet, and the AI systems trained by gradient descent are built by a process whose logic is precisely Dawkinsian: variation (parameter perturbation), selection (loss reduction), and retention of gains, compounded across millions of steps. Universal Darwinism transforms AI