Mark Vellend proposes that two principles—physics and evolution—suffice to understand the world by separating necessary phenomena from contingent outcomes. Physics produces inescapable features such as the periodic table and fundamental physical laws. Evolution, defined broadly as outcomes dependent on prior events, produces contingent features such as species, technologies, cultures and institutions. The study of historical contingency unites disciplines from evolutionary biology to anthropology, history, economics and political science. Core evolutionary processes include variation, selection and inheritance, which generate diversity and allow better-adapted variants to persist in particular environments and circumstances.
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but then again no one could have predicted the giraffe, the iPhone or JD Vance. The laws of physics don't demand them; they all just evolved, expressions of how (for better or worse) things happened to turn out. Ecologist Mark Vellend's thesis is that to understand the world, physics and evolution are the only two things you need. Evolution, here, refers in the most general sense to outcomes that depend on what has gone before.
When biologists talk of evolution, they tend to mean the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, which incorporates three phenomena variation, selection and inheritance. Life generates diversity: some animals, for example, can run faster than others. (Darwin didn't know how such variation arose; it is now attributed to genetic mutation.) Some of those variants help an animal survive because they're better adapted to its environment and circumstances.
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