Chris Dragan's Corner

Most people consider evolution just a proven biological theory which explains biodiversity and how humans came to be.

But I think of it in a different way.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of meme theory. In my definition a meme is any cohesive set of information which together makes a whole. Examples of types of memes include stories, books, gossips, religions, computer programs, food recipes, designs (mechanical, architectural), movies, songs, etc. A notable example is of course information encoded in chromosomes about an individual organism.

Memes are copied very easily. For example stories are told and repeated, books get revised, movies get remakes, designs get fixed and improved, creatures reproduce, etc.

When memes are copied, they are also often modified for whatever reason. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes because of errors. When you look at a history of a meme, it will look like a graph. Multiple copies may be modified in different ways. In time the meme changes.

This is evolution.

So in my definition, evolution is change which happens to any kind of memes or information over time. This change is inevitable. Even if there is no practical need to change memes, they often change due to errors resulting from the imperfectness of the medium (such as human memory, errors when copying genes, etc.)

To many programmers this is no news, since “genetic algorithms” are very useful in searching enormous parameter spaces for local maxima.

Evolution is everywhere and governs the change of everything.