Carbon-Based Evolutionary Theory: A Conceptual Framework Unifying Chemical, Biological, and Social Evolution
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Why simple carbon-containing small molecules can evolve stepwise into complex, diverse, and ordered living organisms and social organizations remains an unresolved core scientific question. Existing evolutionary theories each apply to only one stage—chemical, biological, or social evolution—thereby fragmenting the complete evolutionary picture. This article develops Carbon-Based Evolutionary Theory (CBET), a framework theory deduced from six scientific principles and two universal mathematical rules through an eight-step process. CBET identifies two mechanisms shared by chemical, biological, and social evolution: the dual-loop feedback mechanism, which generates changes ceaselessly, and the persistence selection mechanism, which filters changes ceaselessly and encompasses natural selection and artificial selection. CBET decouples natural selection from biological inheritance and calculates logarithmic fitness of various CBMs using the Malthusian formula. CBET accommodates major evolutionary phenomena—including niche construction, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, non-random mutation, coevolution, and neutral mutations—and subsumes the core viewpoints of the major theories of chemical, biological, and social evolution, yielding three derivative theories. It further proposes that human society has already entered a preliminary Global Unified Cooperative Society (GUCS). CBET also provides a systematic, positive, and balanced ethical reference that has the potential to dispel the negative ethical influence of Social Darwinism.
Source: Preprints.org
Authors: Jiming Chen, Jiwang Chen
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221160929