How are we to think of evolution beyond biology today? And how can we avoid reducing it
to the banal metaphor of progress? The development of civilization in the first decades of
the twenty-first century has fostered an intensification of apocalyptic and dystopian modes
of thought—yet this by no means precludes thinking in evolutionary terms. On the
contrary: evolutionary thinking may offer a particularly productive way of describing
ambiguous trends and sudden transformations. Evolutionism remains an indispensable
component of modern social imaginaries, even when it is not always recognized or explicitly
named as such.
Evolution may be understood either as a gradual process or as an organizing principle
governing transformations within complex systems, while evolutionism may be conceived
as a body of methods and concepts employed to describe transformations in society,
culture, and technology. The distinction, therefore, is between evolution as an object of
inquiry and evolutionism as an analytical framework for describing processes of change.
While Darwinism remains the dominant paradigm within the natural sciences, both
transformist approaches and Lamarckism may prove intellectually generative within the
humanities and social sciences. The phenomenon and discourse of evolution should be
examined in relation to materialism, which conceives of evolution as an immanent process
devoid of telos, as well as to new materialism, within which evolution may be understood
as an ontology of the differentiation of forms, as the ceaseless production of zoe, and
matter itself as living and self-organizing within a relational process of becoming. Other
perspectives, however, are equally significant: within idealist or essentialist frameworks,
evolution becomes inscribed within a broader metaphysical order. It is therefore also
important to emphasize the connections between evolutionary theory and humanistic
reflection on the nature and development of technology.
The connections between evolutionary theory and humanistic reflection on the
development of technology became apparent as early as four years after the publication of
On the Origin of Species, with Samuel Butler’s famous essay Darwin among the Machines
(1863). In recent years, the debate over the place of technology within concepts of
evolutionary development has gained particular intensity amid the latest wave of interest
in AI. In this context, especially significant are the links between evolutionism and quasireligious
forms of transhumanism, progressivism, and accelerationism, as well as the
question of the role these formations may play in ideological legitimization of technocapital.