  Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological
phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and
thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how
rapidly evolution occurs, and its coupling to ecology have not been
satisfactorily addressed and formulated. The lack of widespread appreciation
for, and understanding of, the evolutionary process has arguably retarded the
development of biology as a science, with disastrous consequences for its
applications to medicine, ecology and the global environment. This review
focuses on evolution as a problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics,
where the key dynamical modes are collective, as evidenced by the plethora of
mobile genetic elements whose role in shaping evolution has been revealed by
modern genomic surveys. We discuss how condensed matter physics concepts might
provide a useful perspective in evolutionary biology, the conceptual failings
of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the open-ended growth of complexity, and
the quintessentially self-referential nature of evolutionary dynamics.
