Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl

Sure, those are the ingredients for evolution to occur. Replication and variation affecting selection.

But it's also pretty reductive to say it's the entire thing. You'd be hard pressed to describe the history of life on earth using only those three concepts. You could do it, but it would be a bit like describing the workings of a human cell exclusively using quantum field theory.

There are many emergent concepts, the understanding of which brings a lot more explanatory power. Things like selective pressure and evolvability. Our understanding of evolutionary biology and evolution in general indeed continues to evolve nearly 2 centuries after On the Origin of Species.

One of the most interesting things to me is that the process of evolution itself evolves. Variation, replication and selection evolve over time. Evolution seems to accelerate. Evolution can even create entirely new substrates for itself on top of the old ones. If you look at all the traits that distinguish humans from our closest relatives, the brain sizes, the slow maturation of offspring, our vocal chords, complex language, etc, there's a single thread running through all of it, namely an entirely new evolutionary substrate: culture. Once culture appeared, evolution accelerated massively. And cultural evolution itself seems to accelerate. It took several hundreds of thousands of years to get to the agricultural revolution, but then it only took several thousand years to reach the industrial revolution/enlightenment. From there it took centuries to invent the computer, about half a century for the internet and now society changes dramatically within a single decade, some might even argue a single year. In certain specific cases, we can even do evolution in the span of hours or minutes (seconds?) now, with genetic algorithms and the like.

And yes, biological evolution, cultural evolution and genetic algorithms all operate via variation, selection and replication, but it should be pretty clear by now how important all the little details and emergent phenomena are for understanding the differences between them.