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Darwinism is a term used for various processes related to the ideas of Charles Darwin, particularly concerning evolution and
natural selection.
To say that Darwinism is often used by biologists is an understatement that verges on bathos; Darwinian random variation and
subsequent selection is occasionally used by mathematicians to describe evolutionary processes that resemble the evolution of
life, such as the development of software with genetic
algorithms. The 19th century term "survival of the fittest" coined by Herbert Spencer was a distortion of Darwin's views. Spencer and others developed "evolutionary" views of
society, termed "Social Darwinism," which eventually discredited
many of the extensions of Darwin's ideas in inappropriate contexts, in philosophy and the social sciences. When used in this way,
the concept of Darwinism was divorced from the details of biological evolution, which have become clear starting almost
a century after the publication of Origin of the Species, 1859.
A Darwinian process requires the following conditions:
- Self-replication: Some number of entities must
be capable of producing copies of themselves, and those copies must also be capable of reproduction.
- Inheritance: The copies must resemble the originals, or
be more likely to share traits of their originals than those of unrelated entities.
- Variation: The copies must occasionally be imperfect, so
that the population of objects exhibits a variety of traits.
- Selection: Inherited traits must somehow affect the ability
of the entities to reproduce themselves.
In any system given these four conditions, by whatever means, evolution is likely to occur. That is, over time, the entities
will accumulate complex traits that favor their reproduction.
See also: Evolution
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