Darwin Does Physics

Darwin Does Physics documents the amazing proliferation of scientific theories in the Darwinian paradigm to many different subjects. Many aspects of biology, cultural evolution, the neural sciences and the social sciences have now been explained within the Darwinian paradigm. Now there are even fundamental physical theories which identify Darwinian mechanisms at the core of cosmological and quantum evolution. This book extends the Darwinian paradigm described by Dawkins in terms of replicators and vehicles to one expressed in terms of inferential systems. Darwinian processes infer adaptations from the evidence they gather in their experience of reality. Inferential systems found throughout nature and operating in arenas such as biology and even science itself are found to accumulate knowledge in a surprisingly similar manner. Special attention is paid to the theory of quantum Darwinism and the sense in which quantum systems, at the foundations of reality, accumulate knowledge of each other.