>A beautiful thing about Evolution by Natural Selection is that the principle itself is metaphysical, not physical. It exists in the same realm as math or logic.
Evidence of this is genetic algorithms. They would work even if darwin was completely wrong. Physical evolution just happens to follow "metaphysical" evolution.
Though I think people if you are not thinking of evolution as an abstract thing already, you will categorize genetic algorithms as something that mimics evolutions rather than expressing or embodying it.
Richard Dawkins made this click for me with his concept of memes.
There is also an idea for universes evolution. It builds on (and flavours) the ideas for an anthropic universe. A Universe spawns child universes (in a black hole?) and these inherit most but not all (mutation) of the fundamental aspects of the parent universe.
If you want to get very wacky and go into 'simulated universe' speculations (I do!), evolution can play a role here too. If we were to create our own simulated universe, it would probably be some variation of our own.
The mechanisms of evolution have also been attributed to the development of different religions. One guess to the reason why there are so few religions with no obvious reward system is that it's more difficult to convert people to these, compared to major religions like Christianity and Islam where there are great, clearly defined rewards and punishments.
I guess, at one point in time, there were a lot more religions with neither reward or punishment system in place or just either one of these, and adopting more feedback systems to a religion at the time greatly boosted its breadth and penetration across populations.
I don't remember where I heard this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.
Evidence of this is genetic algorithms. They would work even if darwin was completely wrong. Physical evolution just happens to follow "metaphysical" evolution.