On Memetics. Tim Tyler - Home Page. Eternal return. Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
The concept is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics. With the decline of antiquity and the spread of Christianity, the concept fell into disuse in the Western world, with the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche, who connected the thought to many of his other concepts, including amor fati. In addition, the philosophical concept of eternal recurrence was addressed by Arthur Schopenhauer. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation, but the return of beings in the same bodies. Time is viewed as being not linear but cyclical. The Scale of the Universe 2. Evolution. Eternal return. Universal Darwinism. Universal Darwinism (also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory,[1] or Darwinian metaphysics[2][3][4]) refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth.
The idea is to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can be applied to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics. Basic mechanisms[edit] At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process.