Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics

by Mark Vellend

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Biology

264 pages, Hardcover

Published August 19, 2025

About the author

Mark Vellend is professor of biology at the Université de Sherbrooke and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of "The Theory of Ecological Communities" and "Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics". He conducts research and writes about ecology, evolution, and biodiversity.

Reviews

[Isabelle Laforest-Lapointe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclosure, I am a colleague of Mark Vellend at Université de Sherbrooke.

Everything Evolves by Mark Vellend is a brilliant and accessible work that transcends disciplinary boundaries. With elegance, Vellend proposes a generalized evolutionary theory to help us understand the dynamics of life — from biology to culture, from economic systems to empires. His “evolutionary soundboard,” built around four key parameters (variation, inheritance, movement, and differential success), becomes a powerful tool for exploring complex systems.

This book isn’t just for biologists: it speaks to anyone curious about how the world works. Vellend invites reflection without imposing conclusions, and his personal stories add a deeply human touch to the narrative. A must-read for thinkers, scientists, and anyone seeking meaning in complexity.

[Peter Tillman]

The New Yorker's short take, in their Best Books newsletter:
"In this ambitious book, Vellend, a biologist, attempts to establish a “generalized evolutionary theory” to stand alongside physics as a crucial paradigm for understanding “how everything came to be.” Here, biological evolution is merely one instance of a more fundamental process that can be seen in any system in which “new variants are produced, inherited, and moved around” and only some variants proliferate. Stepping away from living things, Vellend finds this dynamic at work in the development of violins and typewriters, in the technologies undergirding ChatGPT, and in the spread of cultural values like individualism."

I'll be reading this one. Blessedly short!

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclosure: I know the author and provided feedback on a draft.

In his previous book, aimed at his fellow academic ecologists, Mark Vellend argued that "horizontal" community ecology--basically, the subset of community ecology concerned with species abundances, diversity, and coexistence within trophic levels--can be thought of as closely analogous to evolutionary biology. Each of the fundamental forces of evolution--mutation, drift, selection, migration, and speciation--has a community ecology analogue, and there's no force in horizontal community ecology that doesn't have an evolutionary analogue. This analogy provides a conceptual framework for horizontal community ecology, so that the field makes some kind of logical sense and isn't just a complicated mess of unrelated special cases.

Now, in this new book, aimed at the general public, Mark extends the analogy to, well, just about everything (well, everything that's not physics or reducible to physics--chemistry, engineering, etc.). He also insists that it's not an analogy. That is, rather than viewing (say) the evolution of human languages as analogous to Darwinian evolution, we should view both as merely special cases of abstract, broadly applicable evolutionary principles. Taking that view hopefully opens the way to new evolutionary insights about all sorts of things, while avoiding the reflexive suspicion of any attempt to apply Darwinian ideas to humans.

As an academic myself, I'm not part of the target audience for the book, and so perhaps not well-placed to judge how well it succeeds. For instance, I found it a very easy read--crisp, clear, well-explained. I don't *think* that's because I'm already familiar with the book's ideas, but it's hard for me to say for sure. And I think the author's approach to the topic is interestingly distinct from that of (say) Dan Dennett or Matt Ridley, but it's hard for me to say whether the distinctions would be as evident to a non-academic reader.

In case you're interested, here's a blog post by the author about the book, with a good comment thread involving the author, myself, and some other academics: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/...

[FAPascale · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really for folks who enjoy approachable prose about high-level ideas and are not above geeking out over a good nerdy tidbit or two, whether this is about music, technology, biodiversity or economics.

I might be biased (I know the author, though opinions are entirely my own), but I especially enjoyed Mark’s clear “soundboard” analogy: it manages to tame the incredible diversity of evolutionary systems by introducing new levels of complexity to the reader in gradual, manageable increments.

As someone trained in the natural sciences and now actively working in ecology and evolution, the “second science” feels like meeting a roomful of fascinating long lost cousins who I can’t wait to learn more about.

[Rhys Lindmark · Rating 3 out of 5]

There will be many books on generalized evolution this century. The written zeitgiest is finally catching up to the scientific consensus, which is finally catching up to reality. Everything evolves.

This is a good proto-book in that genre. Others are coming soon from Levin, Hazen, etc. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit here.

Overall, I thought this book was fine. Nothing exceptional, but some helpful concept handles. Other quick thoughts:

1. I liked how Velland re-cleaved science along evolutionary vs. mechanistic axes, rather than physical vs. social sciences. Evolution is indeed the Second Science.
2. I'm still processing how Velland adds "movement" to the traditional view of evolution, which is the selection of inherited variation.
3. I think much of the book felt scattered. Yes, major transitions in evolution are important. But they get randomly shoved into a chapter on complex adaptive systems and nonlinear transitions.

I'd recommend this for evolution nerds. Everyone should be an evolution nerd.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interesting premise of this book is that evolution goes far beyond its biological applications, reaching into everything from economics and language to invention. Strictly the title doesn't accurately fit the starting point we get regularly reiterated in the text, which is that there are basically two sciences. The first science is physics, and the other is evolution.

The idea here is that physics is based on natural laws, fundamental constants and the like and is effectively unchanging (hence my doubt about the title). This then drives chemistry and biology, which as all physicists will agree (but probably not many chemists and biologists) are just more messy applications of physical principles. The second science, though, Mark Vellend argues is all about change and explains many things that physics-based science can never deal with.

I could really enjoy a book of this kind if it gave us lots of detail about evolution in those application areas like economics and languages which are outside our usual experience. But, unfortunately, we only get passing examples with no depth. Velland is far more concerned with the nature of evolution itself and various implications of it, notably a dip into AI, without covering any depth in those topic like economics I wanted to know more about.

I felt mostly what we were presented with could have been achieved in a long article - at times it seemed very repetitive in going through what evolution entails conceptually over and over without getting onto those interesting bits. My other concern was with the fundamental concept, because I'm not sure evolution is a science.

Calling evolution the second science feels to me like a category error. Evolution is more like a logic statement. Think, for example, of a statement based on logic. If A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then logically we can discover that A is bigger than C. I would not describe this as science: it's just a tool that can be used in science. Similarly, evolution is the logical statement that if there is variation in entities, plus a degree of inheritance of characteristics and success based on those characteristics, then the set of those entities will change to succeed more. Evolution is hugely powerful and important, but in the end is trivial logic.

I struggled, then, to get on with this book. I wholeheartedly agree that evolution applies to much more than biology, but wanted a very different take on the application of it and would have liked a less grandiose conception of what evolution is.

[Katie Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beyond thought-provoking, it's transformative. Its implications go deep. I re-read several sections to fully integrate the ideas. It is already shaping the way I think about a wide range of situations, in everyday life and in broader society. It's a supremely useful lens.