Generalizing Darwinism to Social Evolution: Some Early Attempts

Richard Dawkins coined the term universal Darwinism (1983). It suggests that the core Darwinian principles of variation, replication, and selection may apply not only to biological phenomena but also to other open and evolving systems, including human cultural or social evolution. Dawkins argued that if life existed elsewhere in the universe, it would follow the Darwinian rules of variation, inheritance, and selection. He had earlier proposed the “meme ” as the unit of cultural replication and selection (1976). 1 This idea that Darwinism may have a broad applicability to other open and evolving systems has been developed in different ways by several contemporary authors, including Richard