Dawkins, Dennett, and the attempts at universalizing Darwinism

Abstract

Although Darwinian natural selection is concerned with living beings, some biologists and philosophers defend that there is nothing in this process that should restrict it to those beings. This way, anything that reproduces itself using parts of its environment should be subjected to natural selection. This theory has been called Universal Darwinism. Daniel Dennett claims that the process of natural selection is algorithmic, that is, a formal process independent from the substratum in which it takes place. Theories of this kind, however, tend to be misunderstood. Gould, their main critic, takes them as a variation of adaptationism. But without recourse to a residual vitalism, Gould seems not to be able to say why natural selection could only occur among living beings.