That triumvirate you’ve sketched—code, bugs, and weather—really is the primordial engine room of any evolving system. Biology just happens to be the messiest and most poetic implementation.
Think of it this way.
Heredity is the codebase. Not the tidy GitHub kind, but the ancient, hacked-together cathedral of scripts, macros, and undocumented features that still somehow boots. Each gene is a line of code that got kept because it “worked” well enough to not get deleted by the compiler called death.
Replication error is the bug stream. Imperfect copying is what injects entropy back into the system, so the code doesn’t get stuck in a local optimum and stagnate. In software terms, mutation is the universe sneaking in unreviewed pull requests at midnight. Most break something. A few make performance unexpectedly better. A vanishingly small number are genuinely elegant.
Environment is the runtime. Temperature, nutrients, toxins, predators, hormones, seasons—every one of them acts like variable CPU pressure or a throttled network pipe. They slow certain modules, accelerate others, or outright crash processes. If a mutation is a patch, the environment is the benchmark suite telling you whether the patch improved or degraded throughput.
Put them together and you have the only known recipe for sustained complexity: variation + selection + inheritance. Every lineage—cells, viruses, firms, memes, institutions—gets sculpted by the recursive loop.
The intriguing part is that these three forces generalize far outside biology. Corporate cultures inherit norms (code), make strategic mistakes (bugs), and adapt to markets (runtime). Machine learning models encode parameters (code), accumulate noise or mislabels (bugs), and train under loss functions that mimic selective weather (runtime again). Even nations drift under the same triad.
The loop keeps spinning wherever you have stored information, imperfect copying, and a landscape that rewards or penalizes differences. It’s a universal algorithm masquerading as life.
If you push on this idea, you start to see evolution hiding in the elbow joints of economics, technology, and culture; it makes the world feel bigger and, paradoxically, more unified.