It gets bandied about as though it’s in contrast to nature, separate from it. Like, “I’d take civilization over nature any day; there’s lions and tigers and bears out there!” As if we left evolution, red in tooth and claw, behind. There’s a reason Marx and Darwin are contemporaries.
I’d like to here propose a distinction; a difference in kind and scale. There’s Generational Evolution – Darwin outlined this while sketching finches and pinning insects to corkboards. It’s slow. Generations upon generations, infinitesimally small changes seeping through populations bit by bit. He described it as “survival of the fittest” but I think “perpetuation of the first thing that just so happens to work” better captures it.
And then there’s Behavioral Evolution. If the first sort of evolution was slow, this one is a lightning-strike. Genetic Evolution needs a bottleneck to up the pace - needs to crawl right up next to extinction for a new trait to propagate in only a lifetime or two. We, on the other hand, just need to talk to each other. We learn. Our behavior changes at the rate we allow it to.
Of course, it’s not as if we’re no longer subject to that older sort of evolution. Genes still do their thing - but, again, that wheel turns slow. It’s got a great and terrible momentum. We don’t harness it. Not this century, or the next. Hell, probably not even this millennium. We have a much more attainable goal - harnessing Behavioral Evolution.
At present, we use words like “civilization” as though we already have. As though we’re not still stuck perpetuating the first thing that just so happens to work. As though liberal-democracy nation-states were some deliberate design and not just classes of people acting out of material self-interest, reacting to others doing the same, enriching themselves via the latest scheme that happens to work. It’s funny; here in the US, the people who deny evolution and the people who champion market economics have such a broad overlap.
this, I believe, is how we frame the struggle of the 21st century. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the evolution of class struggles.” Communism is the belief, the dream, of putting consciousness in the driver’s seat. Of making dialog the defining evolutionary pressure, rather than a mere component.
Astrophysicists describe the evolution of different types of elements, nebula, stars, and galaxies since the big bang
Geologists research the evolution of minerals through geologic time
Why shouldn’t we look at society as the product of it’s own sort of evolution?
This comment just confirms what I said. The concept of “geological evolution” is just an expression to describe changes that take place within the system, it has nothing to do with what happens in biological evolution
There’s actually a surprising amount of overlap. Life alters the chemical composition of the earth, which slowly changes the development of minerals over time. New minerals form, existing minerals form at different rates and quantities; they get reincorporated into biological processes and, in turn, produce new byproducts. Each impacts the other.
Your approach looks inspired by the parallel between genes and memes. So long as there isn’t a similar unit being replicated in geologic “evolution”, your example kinda falls short, even though I think you were on to something in the post itself.